Shutter speed is perhaps the most creative adjustment available to the digital photographer. It allows us to freeze action or use motion blur to create a variety of effects, and is expressed in seconds or fractions of seconds depending on the length of exposure.

A high shutter speed (1/1000 of a second or higher) can freeze even very fast moving objects dead in their tracks. However, you will need to keep a couple of things in mind:

1.) You are going to need a brightly lit subject as shutter speeds this high don’t allow your camera much time to gather light for exposure. You can get around this to a degree by using a higher ISO setting, but don’t go to high, or noise will creep into your shot.

2.) If possible, set up your shot by having your camera focused on the spot where your subject is going to pass by. This will allow you to concentrate on timing your subject’s approach, giving you a better chance to trip the shutter at just the right moment.

Medium shutter speeds (1/20 of a second to 1/80 of a second) can be used to create motion blur when photographing moving objects. This gives the photo a sense of life and motion. Here are several ways you can approach this type of motion blur:

1.) With your camera stationary, trip the shutter as a moving subject passes by. This will make the subject look blurred, while keeping the rest of the shot clear—giving your subject a look of speed and a sense that it is moving out of the shot.

2.) Follow your subject through the viewfinder in a smooth sweeping motion as it approaches, and trip the shutter as your subject goes by—this is called “panning.” This method will keep your subject relatively clear, but will blur the background, giving an overall sense of speed and movement. The timing for this type of shot takes a little practice, but the results make it well worthwhile.

3.) When shooting a stationary subject, purposely move your camera in a sweeping or circular motion to create a blur of colours and lines. This one is a lot of fun and can provide some interesting abstract results.

Low shutter speeds (1/8 of a second up to 30 seconds and beyond) can be used to create a variety of effects—here are just a few:

Note: For most of these long exposures a tripod or some other means of keeping the camera perfectly still is necessary to avoid creating unintended blur.

1.) Moving water will look smooth and silky when shot at shutter speeds of 1/8 of a second or more—the longer the exposure the more pronounced the effect.

2.) When photographed at shutter speeds of 2 seconds or greater, car lights will turn into long colourful trails—the longer the exposure, the longer the trails.

3.) When very long exposures are used (15 seconds plus) city lights will often take on a stretched, star-like appearance.

4.) Photographing city lights at shutter speeds of 1/15 of a second, or so, either from a moving vehicle, or while walking, can produce interesting and colourful abstracts (no tripod needed.)

Most digital cameras have a shutter speed priority setting, which allows you to control the shutter speed—try it—it can open up a whole new world, and its loads of fun to boot.

Most all dramatic sports photos are shot with the lens wide open or one stop from wide open. This is done for two reasons. First you need all the shutter speed you can get, which means shooting wide open, but just as important, it has to do with isolating the subject. As the aperture on a lens opens up, less and less of the photo is in focus. The longer the lens, the more dramatic the change. The larger the distance between the subject and the background the more out of focus the background will come. If you use a long lens and a fast aperture, then your subject will stand out and the background elements will have less impact on your photo.

Reducing background noise is an important goal in many photographs, sports action or not. In studio or landscape settings, you have time to control the elements that make up the picture. Action photography is a "grab it now" type of shooting and you live with the background that is there. If you open up the lens to its maximum, you will find your subjects standing out and becoming memorable.

When you are shooting sports, in particular football and soccer, keep in mind that plays shot on the far side of the field are closer to the background than shots on the near side of the field. Thus if you are shooting a soccer player moving the ball down field and the player passes in front of the bench when you snap the shot, you will have a very distracting background. It may be hard to separate the player and ball from the background noise. Fences, signs, poles, bleachers, stands, and people on the far sideline can really mess up a good shot. Even though you might be shooting wide open, the background will be too prominent in these shots. Should they be avoided? If you have better shots, don’t use it. However, it may be your best shot. Shoot it, just be aware that distracting backgrounds are more problematic on shots on the far side of the field.

The advantages of digital photography over traditional film include:

• Instant review of pictures, with no wait for the film to be developed: if there’s a problem with a picture, the photographer can immediately correct the problem and take another picture.
• Only successful pictures need to be printed. This allows one to take numerous shots of the same scene with slightly different settings, then choose the best one. This review and revise process is impossible with traditional film because such film requires time and equipment to develop.
• Minimal ongoing costs for those wishing to capture hundreds of photographs for digital uses, such as computer storage and e-mailing, but not printing.
• If one already owns a newer computer, permanent storage on digital media is considerably cheaper than film.
• Images may be copied from one medium to another without any degradation.
• Pictures do not need to be scanned before viewing them on a computer.
• Ability to print your own pictures using a computer and consumer-grade printer.
• Ability to print your own pictures using printers that can communicate directly with the camera, or its memory card, for computer-less printing.
• Digital cameras can be much smaller than film cameras of equivalent quality.
• Ability to embed metadata within the image file, such as the time and date of the photograph, model of the camera, shutter speed, flash use, film speed, and other similar items, to aid in the reviewing and sorting of photographs. Film cameras have limited ability to handle metadata, though many film cameras can "imprint" a date over a picture by exposing the film to an internal LED array (or other device) which displays the date.
• In camera electronics allow many features and effects which would be impossible with film.
• Ability to capture and store hundreds of photographs on the same media device within the digital camera; by contrast, a film camera would require regular changing of film (typically after every 24 or 36 shots).
• Many digital cameras now include an AV-out function (and cable) to allow the reviewing of photographs to an audience using a television.
• Digital photography enables you to experiment with the camera settings, different styles of images can be tried out, learnt from and techniques improved all without the expense of film processing.
• Digital anti-shake tools allow taking sharp hand-held pictures where previously a tripod was required
• You effectively have a home colour darkroom where you can do much with an image.
• You bypass the photo labs.
• You can change the ISO values easily in the middle of shooting, for example when the weather changes from bright sunlight to cloudy. In film it means you have to rewind the film, unload it and load the new film with desired ISO value, and this is obviously not as convenient.

Disadvantages of digital cameras

• Power consumption (battery usage) greatly exceeds that of film cameras.
• Digital images are less trusted as evidence than film images
• Digital sensors often have less dynamic range than color print film. However, some newer CCDs such as Fuji’s Super CCD, which combines diodes of different sensitivity, have addressed this problem.
• Multi-coloured image noise is evident in some pictures.

For most consumers in prosperous countries such as the United States and Western Europe, the advantages of digital cameras outweigh their disadvantages. However, the professional photography community is split on the issue. Much of the post-shooting work once done in the past by a photo lab is now done by the photographer himself. Problems some professional photographers have voiced include: editing and post-processing of RAW files can take longer than 35mm film, downloading a large number of images to a computer can take away from valuable shooting time, shooting in remote sites requires the photographer to carry a number of batteries and add to the load she/he must carry, all cameras break from time to time — film cameras can often be fixed on the spot but digital cameras often can not