Oct 17, 2018

Shutter Speed Techniques – Ultra-slow Speed and Super-fast Speed


The action of a Short-eared Owl in very low light conditions among tall wind-blown prairie grasses provides a unique artful fall image of a bird in flight.

What happens if you are in a low light situation and have little chance of stopping the flight action of your subject? Go with it. Take that slow shutter speed photo and see how it turns out. Take a number of flight photos of an individual bird or a flock. Sometimes motion in a photograph can be pleasing, it can show varying degrees of motion in a still photograph that can be interesting, if not impressive. These photos can also be artful, and when that happens, it’s really exciting.

Swing your camera as you follow the bird’s flight, and see how the resulting images turn out. Then work with this technique to further slow the shutter speed, which can be quickly accomplished if you increase the depth of field (AV). If you are photographing at the end of the day, you will gradually get less and less light to work with, requiring a slower shutter speed to register an image.

You can also dial down your ISO setting to 100 or less. Try ever lower ISO settings combined with ever larger depth of field settings in low light conditions and see what happens. It’s definitely not an exact technique, but when you get some interesting or artsy photos you will get the itch to try it again and again with different families of birds under different conditions.

A good example of when to give this technique a try is when you have repeating opportunities to photograph single birds or flocks of birds, such as when you are near a flock of geese that are taking flight from a lake or when they are landing among a flock of feeding geese. Other examples would be when you are photographing seabirds migrating along a coastline, or when flocks of wading birds are flying to a night roost.

Super-fast Shutter Speed

Conversely, the faster the shutter speed, the more likely you are to stop the action of a flying bird in a photo or series of photos you take. That is, a shutter speed of 1/500 of a second or faster is most likely to stop the action of a flying bird.

A fast shutter speed against a clear sky provided a sharp-focus photo that reveals the bending of the long primary flight feathers during a Golden Eagle's downstroke.


It is relatively easy to stop the action of wingbeats with adequate light. In fact, that’s what we usually try to do – stop a bird’s wingbeats or flight speed to get a sharp image of the big primary feathers during wingstrokes. In the process, the eyes and beak are sharp, as is the bird overall. When the bird is flying with a blue sky background or a white sky background, you may be photographing with a 1/2000 of a second, which should stop any motion.

You can try either of these techniques anytime, although the ultra-slow speed photos are most likely the type you will need to concentrate on and try repeatedly to see what works to get in-motion photographs. For sure, give both these techniques a try soon!

Article and photographs by Paul Konrad

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