When people think about creativity in photography, shutter speed usually isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. Maybe it should be. To me, photography is about grabbing a moment and a feeling and holding onto it. A lot of what we want to record isn’t static — the world is full of motion, and shutter speed is the setting that gives you control over how that motion shows up in the shot.
The Choice
Shutter speed lets you deal with motion two ways: freeze it with a fast shutter speed, or blur it with a slow one to suggest motion.
Freezing Action
Plenty of times you want to freeze action — a bride throwing the bouquet, a fighter jet banking through the sky. “Relatively fast” shutter speed is doing a lot of work in that sentence, because it depends entirely on the subject. 1/250th of a second is probably fine for the bouquet toss. It won’t come close to freezing an F-16 doing over 1,000 mph — that might need 1/2000th.
Implying Motion
One of my favorite tricks is going the other way — slowing the shutter down on a moving subject so some of that motion comes through. Photograph a waterfall at 1/250th and you freeze every drop. Slow it to half a second and the water turns soft, almost like cotton candy — you can practically feel the power behind it. Same idea with a bike race: 1/500th freezes every spoke, sharp and static. Drop to 1/50th and the spokes disappear into blur, and suddenly the photo has motion, sound, a breeze.
Try It Yourself
Grab your camera, switch to Manual, and find a fan — ceiling, window, box, doesn’t matter. Set it on low and shoot it straight on. Increase your shutter speed until each blade goes tack sharp, and note that setting. Then decrease it until the blades disappear into a blur, and note that one too. Turn the fan up to its fastest setting and do it again.
A fast shutter speed freezes motion. A slow one implies it. Either way, motion in your photography is something you control — shutter speed is just the tool that gives you the dial.