“Why are my photos blurry?”  This is the age old question fashion bloggers and their respective photographers {that’d be all of you boyfriends/husbands/close friends of the aforementioned fashion bloggers} have been asking themselves since upgrading to D-SLRs.  Chances are you really don’t have any clue why they’re blurry.  Heck, I know when I started taking pictures with Grace’s new D-SLR, you might as well have put me in a space shuttle and asked me to attempt re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.  We had more blurry photos than you can shake a stick at, and for the longest time, I had no clue why.  There’s a few simple reasons for blurry photos, luckily with even simpler fixes, and I’ll explain each of them for you. Now for the first:

1.  Your shutter speed is too slow.

You’re indoors or outside near dusk.  You’ve selected your desired aperture, selected the shutter speed needed to achieve the correct exposure and you take the picture.  Blurry!  Chances are the shutter speed is too slow and the blur is a result of camera shake.  As a general rule of thumb, when hand-holding your camera, never let your shutter speed go any slower than 1/125th of a second {1/160th of a second is an even safer shutter speed}.  If you’ve decreased the shutter speed as much as you can without risking camera shake, but the photo is still underexposed, increase the ISO.  Increasing the ISO allows you to use faster shutter speeds.  Easy enough right?  Make sure to check back next week for the second part of this three part series.

Thanks for reading!