Tips for Holding Your Camera When Shooting in Slow Shutter Speeds

On this video professional photographer Karl Taylor goes back to basics and demonstrates several important techniques for those who are getting into photography to hold their camera and keep stable even when shooting in low light and slow shutter speeds.

What might be obvious to a more experienced photographer might not be so clear to someone who is just getting into photography. Being as steady as possible has a lot to do with the way you stand, hold the camera and position your hands in relation to your body. The more contact points you have between you and the camera the more stable you can be. If you can use other objects as tools to help you be more stable (a chair, a tree, a fence – use them.

Tylor talks about a rule of thumb for always trying to shoot at a shutter speed which is 1/the focal length of your lens. Actually a more precise rule will be to shoot at 1/focal length of your lens * the crop factor of your camera sensor (so for a Nikon D7000 with a 50mm lens you should try and shoot at 1/75 second and not 1/50 second). Another thing that can help is image stabilization which many lenses (and some cameras) have which can allow you to shoot at speeds 2-3 (and in some cases even 4) times as slow as you could with it (sadly not all lenses have image stabilization).

You can find many more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.