the.com/shutter
the only door a photographer slams thousands of times a second and calls art
means A hinged or sliding panel that covers a window, or the mechanism in a camera that opens and closes to let light hit the film or sensor for a precise instant.
from From the verb 'shut,' which traces back to Old English 'scyttan' (to bolt or close), plus the agent-ending '-er' — so a shutter is literally 'the thing that shuts.' The window sense came first; the camera sense was borrowed centuries later because the little mechanism does exactly the same job, just very, very fast.
- speed limit
- Fastest mechanical shutters fire in 1/8000th of a second
- rolling distortion
- Phone shutters scan slowly, bending fast propellers into jelly
- sound design
- Silent digital cameras fake the click for human comfort
- first cameras
- Early exposures needed minutes, so no shutter existed
- global vs rolling
- Pros pay extra to freeze whole scenes at once
focal plane shutter — mechanical camera shutter that moves across the film plane, used in most slr cameras since the 1950s
leaf shutter — overlapping metal blades that open/close in the lens, used in rangefinder cameras like leica m3