When you first start taking pictures, you'll notice that sometimes your pictures turn out blurry. Perhaps you've always though that it could be any number of elements, from the camera, moving the camera while shooting, or the lighting that's being used. Well, it turns out there's another element that most beginner digital photographers are unaware of. And that element is shutter speed photography.
You see, if you're trying to capture action shots with your digital camera, you'll find out that pressing the shutter button doesn't always mean you'll capture the action you're seeing at that exact moment. Often what happens is that the picture is delayed, and then a few seconds after you've pressed the button down, it snaps your shot. This gap in time is called the shutter delay.
Now, in certain scenarios, shutter delay can work to your advantage. When shooting action shots however, it can become very annoying. Most higher end digital slr cameras have a feature that can reduce the time gap of shutter delay to near fractions of a second, but you will always have some delay.
If you're taking an action shot, plan a few seconds ahead when you're about to take a shot. Capturing the goalie mid-air blocking a ball requires careful timing of shooting nearly before he jumps off the ground. The only way to get good at doing this is by practicing shots. And since it doesn't cost anything to take additional shots, practice away.
If you're like me and aren't taking a bunch of action shots, here are some other remedies to help you deal with the inevitable shutter delay. Firstly, a lot of digital cameras have a burst picture mode. When you turn this mode on, you can capture shots as fast as the camera can take them as long as you hold the shutter down or until you fill up the memory card. What the camera does is write the photos to a temporary memory, and once that memory is full, it begins to process the photos to the memory card.
Shooting shots in burst mode will allow you get several shots of the action, and leaves you with the option to chose the shot that turned out the best. Often you'll hear of wedding photographers or sports photographers doing this, as they only have one change to capture the action correctly.
Another little annoying feature of most digital cameras today is their standby mode. It's great if you enjoy a long battery life, but for me, I'm taking shots randomly a lot of the time. When you try to take a picture straight from standby mode, you'll get a delay. When this delay happens, your camera is "booting" up again, and often will take a few seconds to get going. To get around this is to check in your owners manual to turn off or disable the feature. A little trick I've found to avoid this problem is to keep your shutter button half-way depressed every once in a while, so the camera never has a chance to enter standby mode.
Another common delay, but one that is usually helpful is the automatic focus delay. When you press your shutter, you'll hear the camera adjusting the shot to capture the optimal picture. You can avoid this by choosing to do manual focusing or what I often do it press the button halfway down to get the camera ready, and once the action hits, I can very quickly snap my shot.
In the end, you can easily master shutter delay, but you can't get rid of it entirely. A little practice will go a long way. Read about how your camera works in your owners manual, and outsmart your camera by using these little tricks.
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