From the course: Photography Foundations: Flash
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Flash sync speed
- As you should already know, the shutter found in most cameras is composed of two curtains which open and close in rapid succession. The first curtain opens to expose the sensor and then is followed by a second curtain which closes off the view to the sensor. At faster shutter speeds, the second curtain starts to close so soon after the first curtain starts to open that there's actually no time in which the sensor is completely exposed. Instead, there's simply a slit that travels across the surface of the frame. This can create a problem if you're using a flash, because if the shutter is not completely open when the flash fires, then the light from the flash will bounce off your scene, come back through your lens, where the shutter will actually cast a shadow onto your sensor. The results can look like this. Because of the fast shutter speed, the flash was not able to evenly illuminate the entire frame in this shot. This type of shutter mechanism is called a focal-plane shutter…
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