Stop Picking Shutter Speeds at Random

Most people learn to treat shutter speed as the last piece of the exposure puzzle, the number you dial in once aperture and ISO are set and the meter stops complaining. That habit hands one of your most expressive choices to the light meter, since shutter speed decides how motion looks in every frame, from a frozen athlete to a smeared highway at dusk.

Teo Crawford spent years shooting wide open on sunny days for no better reason than his lens allowed it. On his Panasonic Lumix GX80, sold as the Panasonic Lumix GX85 in the U.S., he'd sit at ISO 200 and f/1.7 regardless of the subject, then push the shutter to around 1/2,000 second to keep the exposure in check. For a portrait where he wanted the background as soft as the lens could make it, that order of operations made sense, because aperture was the deliberate priority. For a street scene or a landscape, f/1.7 did nothing useful, and the shutter speed ended up as whatever number balanced the exposure. Crawford's point is that aperture-first thinking became his default without any decision behind it, and that he missed chances to let the shutter shape the picture.

Using a Pentax film camera that tops out at 1/1,000 second as his reference, Crawford walks the dial from fast to slow and gives each stretch a job. At 1/1,000 and above, you're in freezing territory. He'd want at least that for a landscape shot from a moving car with no trace of the car's motion, and more if the car is going fast. Fast sports call for the same, preferably higher, and most digital bodies reach 1/4,000 second or beyond, so the ceiling there is well above what film cameras typically offer. He groups 1/500, 1/250, and 1/125 together as speeds that stop most motion, though not all of it. A football in midair may still carry a little blur at 1/500, while a portrait with some subject movement and minor hand shake is safe at that speed. At 1/125, you're fine as long as neither the subject nor your hands move much.

The old handheld guideline says your shutter speed should be at least one over your focal length, adjusted for crop factor. A 50mm lens on a full frame camera wants 1/50 second or faster, and a 20mm lens on Micro Four Thirds, with its 2x crop, wants about 1/40. Two developments have pushed that rule in opposite directions. In-body stabilization, now standard across most mirrorless systems, buys several stops of leeway on static subjects, which is why handheld shots at 1/15 second or slower have become routine. Meanwhile, sensors of 40 megapixels and up resolve enough detail that slight shake shows up at 100% view where a 12-megapixel file would have hidden it, and many people shooting high-resolution bodies double the old minimum to compensate. Stabilization also steadies only the camera. A person walking through the frame at 1/15 second will smear no matter how many stops your body claims. Choose the shutter speed for what the subject is doing first, then confirm it clears the shake threshold for your lens and sensor.

Below 1/125 is where Crawford's enthusiasm picks up. He describes 1/60 as a balance point where moving subjects take on a natural blur while small hand tremors stay frozen. At 1/30, the motion blur gets exaggerated and handholding becomes trickier depending on your camera and how steady you are, though the GX80's stabilization lets him shoot handheld as slow as 1/10 second. Around 1/15, movement turns obvious, and paired with deliberate camera motion, it produces tracking shots where the subject stays sharp against a streaked background. He treats roughly 1/30 to 1 second as a range for playing with blur without committing to a true long exposure, while noting that keeping a pan steady for a full second is harder than it sounds. Past 1 second, you're in specialty work: a 4-second night scene, a 30-second river, or exposures running half an hour or longer. Most digital cameras let you set up to 30 seconds before switching to bulb mode, where the shutter stays open as long as you hold it and you count the time yourself.

Crawford's favorite shutter speed is in the video above.