At the recommendation of one of the members of my local camera club, the Western Wisconsin Photography Club, I joined the Photographic Society of America (PSA). The PSA is worldwide and was founded in 1934. One of the many benefits of membership included a free individualized photography class for first year members. These are photos that I took for the first lesson in the class demonstrating my competency in using various shutter speeds. I cranked the ISO up to 1000 and shot in shutter priority and let the camera get the proper exposure by choosing the aperture for me. The shot with the fastest shutter speed (1/5000) had the shallowest depth of field, as expected, but this also illustrated that the image with the slowest shutter speed/narrowest aperture was also the brightest.

This exercise was a good refresher for me but I got a bit more information and inspiration on creative uses of shutter speeds in an excellent 10-week video course that I took from John Greengo at Creative Live. Below are a couple of tables I made from notes taken from that class. The first is general purpose and the second tells how shutter speed affects moving water. I’ve printed these out and carry them in my camera bag as a starting point when attempting something new.

A pdf version of both can be downloaded here.