# Drawbacks to a super high shutter speed?



## gconnoyer (Mar 10, 2013)

Say you're out shooting at noon, and its super bright outside. Plenty of light, ISO100, F/whatever you need or want, is there any sort of drawback to shooting at 1/8000th?? 

With a high ISO you get noise, with a super high fstop (ie f/22) some lenses will actually get softer, is there any disadvantage to a super high shutter speed? Assuming you don't NEED a slow speed to capture a certain image.

Just was thinking about this earlier and figured I'd post up here


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## rexbobcat (Mar 10, 2013)

I've heard crackpot crazy people say that because 1/8000 let's very little light through that it can introduce noise (even at 100 ISO). Where they got that information, I have no clue...

But no, as far as I know there are no drawbacks to the 1/8000 shutter speed other than needing really bright conditions or a really fast lens.


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## gconnoyer (Mar 10, 2013)

Hmmm thats interesting (about the noise)

Right the obvious drawback about it is the lack of light, but assuming that for some reason its so bright the you're PRESSED to use something that high, is there anything.


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## Mike_E (Mar 10, 2013)

You'll wear out your shutter faster.

































sorry, I just couldn't help it


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## cgipson1 (Mar 10, 2013)

gconnoyer said:


> Hmmm thats interesting (about the noise)
> 
> Right the obvious drawback about it is the lack of light, but assuming that for some reason its so bright the you're PRESSED to use something that high, is there anything.



NO.. it is ok! Light still moves a lot faster than even 1/8000 of a second! To my knowledge, there are no drawbacks to ultra high shutter speeds.


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## Ballistics (Mar 10, 2013)

gconnoyer said:


> Hmmm thats interesting (about the noise)
> 
> Right the obvious drawback about it is the lack of light, but assuming that for some reason its so bright the you're PRESSED to use something that high, is there anything.



People who shoot wide open at like 1.4 all the time usually make use of 1/4000- 1/8000 shutter speeds in bright day light with no problem.


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## KmH (Mar 11, 2013)

gconnoyer said:


> *Drawbacks to a super high shutter speed?*


Assuming you still have a proper exposure and the motion stopping characteristics you want - none.

As far as rexobcat's comment, if the exposure is controlled according to the concept of ETTR and the lowest appropriate native ISO setting is used, noise would be no more of an issue than using any other low native ISO setting.


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## BrianV (Mar 11, 2013)

No drawbacks at 1/8000th, some cameras went to 1/16000th. The lens aperture is opened up, lets more light in per unit of time. There have been cameras around for a very long time that go much faster, specialty cameras for technical work.


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## Patriot (Mar 11, 2013)

BrianV said:


> No drawbacks at 1/8000th, some cameras went to 1/16000th. The lens aperture is opened up, lets more light in per unit of time. There have been cameras around for a very long time that go much faster, specialty cameras for technical work.



Talking about wearing out the shutter. Is 1/16000th or faster for looking at the Sun or something?


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## EIngerson (Mar 11, 2013)

There is one draw back. Your panning shots won't look cool at 1:8000 of a second.


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## Mike_E (Mar 11, 2013)

Seriously though, there isn't really a need to shoot at 1/8000 unless you want to stop a bullet.  The lower the ISO the better you're going to like it so long as your shutter speed is where you want it for movement- or lack thereof.


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## jake337 (Mar 11, 2013)

Mike_E said:


> Seriously though, there isn't really a need to shoot at 1/8000 unless you want to stop a bullet.  The lower the ISO the better you're going to like it so long as your shutter speed is where you want it for movement- or lack thereof.




Only reason I would use it is to control ambient shooting wide open, or close to, with flash.


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## Robin_Usagani (Mar 11, 2013)

The drawback is you cant use a manual flash. It needs to be HSS(canon) or FP(nikon) mode.  At 1/8000, you only catch small portion of the tail of the light while on this mode so the flash barely does anything.


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## Ballistics (Mar 11, 2013)

Mike_E said:


> Seriously though, there isn't really a need to shoot at 1/8000 unless you want to stop a bullet.  The lower the ISO the better you're going to like it so long as your shutter speed is where you want it for movement- or lack thereof.



There is, if you want complete creative control. Shooting at 1.4/1.8 in sunny 16 situations will require a 1/8000 shutter speed.


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## TCampbell (Mar 11, 2013)

There are only two things that I can think of which can happen at very high shutter speeds.  

Keep in mind the shutter never moves faster or slower regardless of the shutter speed.  The shutter has two "curtains".  The only thing that changes is the timing or delay between the moment that the first curtain starts to open and the moment when the second curtain starts to close.  At slow speeds the first curtain sweeps open and the entire sensor is exposed for some amount of time before the second curtain sweeps closed.  But at high speeds, the second curtain is "chasing" the first curtain across the sensor plane -- leaving just a slit or gap exposed.

1)  This can cause some wonky results when shooting something that is moving VERY fast.  I have a photo of a helicopter lifting off and the rotor blades appear to curve quite unnaturally (that photo, however, was taken with an iPhone.  Not technically a "curtain" shutter, but it does scan the image row by row and each row is technically not scanned at the same time, so you get the same effect that if, by the time it's scanning a lower row, an object has moved substantially from where it appeared in a higher row, then that object will look like it's bending or curving.

This means that "technically" when you shoot an athlete, their legs might be in a fractionally different position in your photo relative to the position of their upper body in your photo as compared to where they actually were in real life.  You get a _very_ tiny distortion, but it's too small to notice.  Likewise if you shoot water drops splashing, some of those drops are fractionally moved from where they were relative to the other water drops.  When the curtains are moving at 1/200th of a second to traverse the entire shutter, then a small detail such as a drop of water (which would have been imaged in less than probably 1/8000th of a second) will appear sharp.  You wont see blur.  But if you photograph something moving VERY fast and you know it's supposed to be "straight" and it covers a large part of the sensor (from bottom to top... or left to right because some curtain shutters move horizontally although I think in most DSLRs they move vertically because the distance is physically shorter) then you can see the bend (like the helicopter blades).

Here's the "Rubber" helicopter (Blades rotate counter-clockwise on this aircraft.  The iPhone camera (probably 1 of about 5 times I have _ever_ used the iPhone camera) scanned the image from top to bottom to capture the image as the blades were rapidly rotating.)





2)  High-speed flash sync either wont work or gets very expensive.  Normally the flash delays firing until the shutter is fully opened, THEN it fires, then the shutter closes.  But in "high speed sync" mode (HSS) the shutter is never "fully" open because only a slit is exposed at any moment in time.  This means you'd have an odd stripe in your photo separating a well-exposed part of the image from the underexposed part of the image.  To compensate, cameras that can work with the flash and both support HSS can compensate.  Rather than one big burst, the flash fires several bursts -- pulsed as the shutter sweeps across the sensor.

The "problem" with HSS is that the flash can't fire at full power.  If two pulses are required (a top-half and bottom-half) then the flash can only fire at max 50% power.  If 4 pulses are required then the flash can only fire at 25% power.  You can quickly see where this goes when you need to fire 8 pulses ... or 16.  There's a point where the flash is simply too weak.  To compensate you need to arrange a "gang" of flashes clustered together.


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## jake337 (Mar 11, 2013)

Robin_Usagani said:


> The drawback is you cant use a manual flash. It needs to be HSS(canon) or FP(nikon) mode.  At 1/8000, you only catch small portion of the tail of the light while on this mode so the flash barely does anything.




I use my sb600, off camera, in manual past 1/200 all the time.  I need to double them up while outdoors to get any decent power though.


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## table1349 (Mar 11, 2013)

cgipson1 said:


> gconnoyer said:
> 
> 
> > Hmmm thats interesting (about the noise)
> ...



Speed of light = 186,000 mi/sec.  I do believe that you are correct and that light is just a hair faster.


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## TCampbell (Mar 11, 2013)

gryphonslair99 said:


> cgipson1 said:
> 
> 
> > gconnoyer said:
> ...



I'm waiting for when we have quantum entangled shutters ... that can move at least 4 orders of magnitude faster than the speed of light!  There's a rumor they'll release that this fall.

Chinese Physicists Measure Speed of "Spooky Action At a Distance" | MIT Technology Review

(yes... I was totally kidding about the rumor.)

We could also have camera shutters with quantum super-positions... the shutter is neither opened nor closed... until it's OBSERVED.  :mrgreen:


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## bratkinson (Mar 12, 2013)

No scientific data here, but I recall the issues of "reciprocity failure" with film. I wonder if the same is true, but, perhaps, to a lesser degree, with digital.

For those unfamiliar with film...if the proper exposure was, say, f22 @ 1/1000 for the film you had loaded in the camera (eg, ISO speed), speeding up the exposure time by 4 and making the f-stop 4 times larger to get the same 'exposure' on the film would actually come out underexposed. Why? Because there is an amount of time for the film to 'react' to the incoming light. If the light doesn't hit the film 'long enough', it just doesn't get the whole intended exposure. Think of it like a small stream of very hot water hitting your hand. If I pour 8 oz of hot water on your hand slowly (long exposure time), it will really HURT! But if I were to squirt 8 oz of hot water from a hose for 1/4 second, it would hurt a bit, but certainly not HURT!. The same is true with film. 

So I wonder, do individual sensels have a 'ramp up' and 'ramp down' time that if exposed less than that time, won't get the 'full picture'?  Or is that ramp up/ramp down speed in the less-than-micro-second speed as to not be a problem?


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