Question about lighting and slow motion

[Dan Measel]

I'm hoping I can get some feedback on how to shoot good slow motion shots. When shooting something you want to look good in slow motion I understand you crank up the shutter speed, but my question is how do you compensate for the decrease in light allowed in with higher shutter speeds so that the lighting matches the regular motion shot? Do you just add a light to the subject? Is there another way of shooting good slow motion?

[Daniel Kohl]

Dan,

I think you should do a search about this. There are a lot of threads that deal with slow motion.

But there are two things I can quickly help you with. There are no prosumer cameras, that I know of, which can do true slow motion. This is because increasing the "shutter speed" only really decreases the length of the exposure time on most video cameras. The number of frames per second remains constant, thus no slow motion. There are however, some dicusions as to how you can optimize how you shoot for slowing things down in post. Things like progressive scan, or interlace, can have varying effects on how things will look in the end depending on what you are planning to shoot.

As for compensating for loss of light due to shorter exposure times, you can increase the size of the lens aperture (smaller number) or add light. In general, I would say that you should use the light you would use for normal shooting, only brighter.

I hope that this is of some help

[Dan Measel]

Thanks for your reply, that was very helpful.

[Andrew Burke]

Hi, I keep the shutter at 1/120 or higher for post production slo-mo's. Since my "regular- motion" shots are lit for 1/30 shutter, I usually have to add more light.

-a