How to Adjust the Camera Shutter

Video Transcript

"Greetings! I'm Joey Gunz. Check me out on line at joeygunz.com. Now I'm here on Expert Village today to talk to you about the next part of my series which is the shutter. In the previous episode we talked about aperture and how you can control depth of field and shutter really controls how much light is going to follow on your subject. The other part of the camera that actually goes into the mechanism with your aperture is the shutter. Now imagine the shutter is like your eye lid and shutter of your eye lid stays closed. In a camera your eye will open and close real quick. While your eye is open that is your camera actually receiving light. It's like a gate so to speak for light to get in and out of your camera. As long as that shutter is closed, no light gets on your film. No light gets on the censor inside your camera but as you open that shutter the light gets in. Well your shutter works in time. It is a timing mechanism. You can leave the shutter open a long time to get more light in. You can open it and close it really fast to get less light in. Now the thing about a shutter is that you can put light on your subject like with a artificial lighting source and you can control how bright or dark your background is going to be by the length of time that you leave your shutter all day. I just want to give you an example to kind of show you here so what I am going to do is and this is my disclaimer, don't try this at home. Don't try it with your digital SLR because if your censor gets dirty, I'm not going to pay for it. Don't call me, don't send me e-mails saying hey, I tried it at home and you messed up my camera. I'm saying this to you right now. Don't try this at home. This is an Internet and I'm a trained professional and if need be, I know how to clean my censor. What we are going to do is we are going to take and I am going to hold this thing up for you and if you look in here, this is a mirror and so that when I look through this lens I look through a little prism in it. It shows me what is actually going on in my camera. Now if you get in there we get real close in on there. Now what I am going to do is when I hold this thing you will see this little thingie in here move and that's the shutter. Now the longer I leave it open the more light gets on my censor and the more light that creates the exposure. So that's your shutter inside your camera and it controls light as it comes in and out. How can I use this? Like I said if you are shooting with an artificial light source, you can set the light source that falls on your subject with your aperture and you can do that, pop your strobe, leave that shutter open a little bit longer, kind of get out there and see if you can get a brighter background or darker background with a shorter shutter speed or you can use your shutter speed in the daytime without an artificial light source to kind of stop motion with extremely fast shutter speed like sports photography, to freeze an athlete or to freeze a car driving by. So that is shutter. Those are some ways you can use it to create an artistic effect or artistic control inside your camera. I'm Joey Gunz. Check me out on line at wwww.joeygunz.com. For Expert Village, we'll see you next time. "