Shutter Speed

The shutter is the simplest machine in photography. Two curtains. The first opens. Light enters. The second follows and closes. The gap between them is a photograph.

In a Leica M, the shutter curtains are titanium. You can hear the difference between 1/1000th and 1/60th — the first is a click, the second is a whisper. Street photographers choose cameras by this sound. Quiet shutters make honest photographs. Loud ones announce the photographer.

On this page, your scroll velocity is the gap between the curtains. Fast scroll, narrow gap, frozen time. Slow scroll, wide gap, blurred duration.

Hiroshi Sugimoto photographed movie theaters. He opened the shutter when the film started and closed it when the credits rolled. Two hours of cinema collapsed into a single frame. The screen is pure white. The theater architecture glows.

This is the paradox of long exposure: more time makes less visible. A crowd becomes a ghost. A waterfall becomes silk. A busy intersection becomes an empty street with light-painted lanes.

The shutter does not record what happened. It records how long you were willing to watch.

Harold Edgerton froze a bullet passing through an apple at 1/1,000,000th of a second. The apple is still intact around the entry wound. The bullet has already exited. Between those two facts is a microsecond the human eye was never meant to see.

Every frozen photograph is a lie about time. It says this moment existed as a discrete thing, separate from the moment before and after. It did not. Time is continuous. The shutter makes it discrete. That is its deepest editorial act.