F55: Question about S&Q and Slow Shutter

[captainjman]

I did a search for F55 Slow Shutter and after looking at 7 pages of results I don't see this topic covered, so I hope this won't be a duplicate thread....

Question: I noticed the "slow shutter" function gives a choice from 2-8 frames... per second is it? Obviously you can't use S&Q and "slow shutter" at the same time...

What exactly does the "slow shutter" actually do? :undecided I have system set to 24fps (23.9x) whatever that exact number is, and when you enter the slow shutter of say - 6 - what exactly are you doing? I noticed that when you turn on the slow shutter that the exposure needs attention. It took an ND grad and and F stop of 8 to get the exposure back to where it was before.

Does anyone have any experience with it? All I got out of it was a blurred mess of overexposed crap - and obviously it is a tool like everything else on the camera - I would like to know everything about it even if I end up never using it. I did a search on google but the truth is that the camera is pretty new, most of the results online were advertisements or reviews / articles... there aren't a lot of long winded / ad nauseam responses.

I understand that this may be because I am a newbie in a camera well outside my "pay grade" - but we already covered that topic in my first thread

Can / will anyone help me figure out this functions?

Thanks

Jason

 

[Andrew Stone]

There are a few uses for slow shutter. One is to use slow shutter is super low light situations to create an overexposure situation. Another approach with slow shutter it to use it in a "frame accumulation" situation where you are doing a time lapse and having bursts of frames every so many frames of runtime.

If you google "Sony slow shutter" you will come up with a variety of scenarios using slow shutter and also see that you are not the only one wondering about its use.

Frame acculmulation and slow shutter techniques can be really powerful with time lapse in busy nightime street shots.

 

[Nate Weaver]

I've used slow shutter for time lapses in other Sony cameras that also give you an intervalometer mode.

Here's an example:

The system frequency is 23.98, so the recording section is writing that many frames per second to the card.

You set Slow Shutter to 2.

So the camera section takes one picture that has a shutter speed of 1/12th of a second, and then writes that one frame to two "frames" in the recording stream.

Set slow shutter to 6, it leaves the shutter open for a 1/4 second, and then writes that one picture over the space of 6 frames.

 

[captainjman]

Thanks guys -

I googled slow shutter before posting - and like you said, there are a lot of people who don't know how to use the function properly. I got more info from the two of you than two hours on google. Thanks guys.

So lets say you use slow shutter (system time of 23.98) with the shutter setting of 6 like you suggested. then each second of play time would have 4 images per second - and those images would be blurred because the shutter would be open for quite a while - so it would create a kind of "warp speed" kind of effect Like a ghost rather than just seeing the objects move consecutively from frame to frame.

So if we were talking about cars at night on a freeway - instead of using a setting of say 4 frames per second and each car would seem to just move from frame to frame and be crystal clear on S&Q, I could set the slow shutter to 6 and get "warp speed" blur instead?

am I getting this right?

Jman