In this week’s photo tip, I thought I’d cover how to freeze action in your camera using nothing more than your camera and your subject.

It’s a fairly straight forward process. Really the main thing that you have to worry about is keeping the shutter speed high enough so that the movement {whether it be jumping, running or any other locomotive action…I’m pretty sure no one’s used that term since kindergarten P.E. class} is completely frozen, i.e. still and not blurry.

The shutter speed that you’ll need to set your camera to for different actions varies. There’s no set shutter speed for each so you’ll have to experiment a bit to find out which one works best. My advice would be to start out with slower shutter speeds and incrementally raise them until the action is entirely frozen and no part of your subject looks blurry.

Here’s an example of where a faster shutter speed would be necessary to ensure that all of the snow flying around would be entirely frozen and not blurry.

There’s a couple of other things you need to remember too when trying to do this in natural lighting. Primarily, as you increase the shutter speed, you’ll be letting less light into the camera, so you’ll have to compensate for this by using larger apertures. If you can’t make your aperture any larger, and your photos are still too dark, try raising the ISO, although you want to avoid this if you can because it puts noise into your photos.

Thanks for reading! P.S. Check out this post for some cool tips on how to focus on moving subjects!