Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Spike]

Did that title make sense?

Anyhow, as someone with a DSLR that has no idea how to use it, that's basically what I want to know. An example scenerio would be a coach having gatorade thrown on him after a win. I want to be able to capture the gatorade the moment before it hits the coach.

Thanks, and please excuse my ignorance.

[FriendlyDaegu]

To freeze things in motion you need a high shutter speed. Your camera will have a mode dial setting called something like shutter priority. In this mode you set the shutter speed and the camera does other things automatically.

For water you need to set the speed very high (fast), something like 1/2000th of a second or more, so while in shutter mode turn the adjust dial to set the speed at 2000 or more (2000 on the display means 1/2000th of a second, 1" on the display means 1 second).

The problem you'll find is that with the shutter not open for very long, not much light gets in and the shots will be darker than normal. The faster the shutter, the darker the shot, although more crisp/frozen. Slower speeds will be brighter, but also more blurry.

The camera will try to auto-adjust aperture and ISO to get a brighter picture, but there are limits. Being in a brightly lit place is the best thing you can do to help get nice shots with a fast shutter. Setting ISO manually to a higher number than it normally goes in auto will also make the picture brighter, but overall image quality will decrease (more noise).

Hope that helps you get started..