Week 14: Assignment 1 Creative use of Shutter Speeds

If this is the first post you are reading on The Complete Level 2 Photography Course, stop! Read the preceding 13 posts first!

Here it is, the first assignment. It's pretty easy really. Won't take too much time. All you have to do is research, plan, test and shoot two photographs. The first will be "creative use of a fast shutter speed" and the second will be, you guessed it, "creative use of a slow shutter speed". By "creative use" I mean thinking up a shot that really uses the attributes and benefits of shutter speeds to create a picture that looks great.

Week 4: Let's work together. ISO, shutter and apertures

The final piece in the “exposure” jigsaw is ISO. What is it and what does it do?

ISO is measure of the cameras sensitivity to light. You may remember it from shooting film, where we sometimes called it “film speed’.

Week 2: Control that motion. Shutter Speeds

What are Shutter Speeds? What do they do?


The camera has two ways of controlling exposure. It has apertures and it has shutter speeds.

So the shutter speeds can act as a simple variable system for controlling exposure by adjusting the timing of the exposure - more time for dark subjects in low light, less time for bright subjects in bright light. But there’s more to it than that…