The Flash Book

When to Change Your Shutter Speed

If you’re doing indoor portraits or headshots, where your subject is photographed against a backdrop, or a roll of seamless paper, etc., you won’t need to change your shutter speed off that 1/125-of-a-second setting. You can “set it and forget it.” So, when would you ever change your shutter speed? Well, here’s the really cool thing: the shutter speed doesn’t affect the power of your flash, whatsoever—you can raise it, lower it, etc., and the brightness of the flash doesn’t change a lick. As you learned back on page 47, the shutter speed controls how much of the existing light in the room (or outdoors) makes its ...