Wedding photography is possibly one of the most difficult and demanding areas of the industry. Things are happening all around you and it’s your job to ensure that you capture the moment perfectly, or risk ruining someone’s big day. Your photographs are going to be the memories that the couple, their families, and their friends hold on to.

Getting the settings on your camera right is critical—especially the shutter speed. Let’s discuss the best shutter speed for weddings.

Generally for weddings you should stay above 1/100 for shutter speed due to the one chance to shoot nature of wedding photography, but many professional wedding photographers choose 1/60 for posed photos for better depth of field, and slow shutter speeds may be used when getting creative for slight motion blur. Let’s explain.

You want to ensure that the image is exactly what you intended so that you can edit it to perfection when you get to postproduction. There’s nothing worse than a soft photograph when you want something sharp. There’s just no way to recover the detail in the image. This is where choosing the right shutter speed for your images comes into play.

Essentially, shutter speed is responsible for how much light gets let into the camera, as well as how long the shutter stays open. The faster the speed, the less light that gets in and the less time it takes for the photograph to get captured. The slower the speed, the more light that can get in and the longer it takes to capture the image.

What is Shutter Speed and Why is it so Important?

Shutter speed is how fast the shutter opens and closes each time you take a photograph. The shutter of the camera is the covering that sits behind the lens but over the …