MINIMUM SHUTTER SPEEDS

How fast or slow does your shutter speed need to be?

handheld, the minimum shutter speed you can use will depend not only on how steady your hand is, but how big and heavy the lens is, as well as the focal length of that lens. The longer the focal length and the bigger/heavier the lens, then the faster the shutter speed must be.

As a rule of thumb, use a shutter speed similar to the focal length – so 1/30sec for 28/35mm, 1/60sec for 50mm, 1/100sec for 100mm, 1/200sec for 200mm and so on. if you have a particularly steady hand you can maybe reduce this. if your lenses have image stabilisation, you can reduce it even further. Your best bet is to conduct some tests with your lenses, to see what the slowest shutter speeds are that still enable you to produce sharp images that don’t suffer from camera shake – you might be surprised just how slow they are!