Where does the term SHUTTER SPEED come from?

[weepete]

Shutter speed as a term works fine in English.

I would suggest that it's a bit confusing as it's a relative measurement.

Given speed=distance/time we could work out the actual speed the shutter needs to move at if we know the sensor size, but that would be confusing and we'd need to learn a lot of equivalent speeds for different sensor or film sizes and given that exposure times are the same for any sensor/film size it's just a shorthand way of expressing an equation with two variables but one constant.

I'd suppose it probably comes from the engineers working on mechanical shutters across different formats and just stuck.

 

[Grandpa Ron]

Stickily speaking I believe "Shutter Speed" is an English Idiom. It is like saying "I am behind in my work", or if you are late "step on it" or "running out of time". One of my favorites is "I am fix'en to go". They are a language shorthand and some can be quite regional. Some would call them improper use of the language, I prefer to call it "linguistic charm".

Most languages have idioms that do not translate well to none native speakers.

 

[Original katomi]

Grand pa Ron your comment echos my early comment, added to which in England there is a lot of times where the use of a word or phrase is carried over to another use. I regularly find on this site that there are instances of word use where I have to work out or ask what is meant by the word use. Some times words can have multiple meanings and a short hand version is used
As photographers we are probably just as bad at using shorthand words of phrases.
If I asked you to pass me my canon DSLR 600d camera.
I would say #Ron can you pass me the 600d, please.#

 

[TWX]

If I asked you to pass me my canon DSLR 600d camera.
I would say #Ron can you pass me the 600d, please.#

I didn't know hastags had come into such common use.

 

[Original katomi]

Er it’s just me, I use them in place of speech marks. I will stop being “lazy” and use “” in future
In my defence I am a fossil
To me ps was post script then play station followed by photoshop
# I still see a denoting sharp in music.
Some days the keyboard layout on my I pad is one way and other days it’s different.
I got into the lazy habit of using # are it was easier to find than “”

 

[Designer]

"Slide me across the floor that-there box."

If'n I was a moderator, I would be a-fix'n to lock this-here thread. It's done outlived its usefulness.

 

[TWX]

Er it’s just me, I use them in place of speech marks. I will stop being “lazy” and use “” in future
In my defence I am a fossil
To me ps was post script then play station followed by photoshop
# I still see a denoting sharp in music.
Some days the keyboard layout on my I pad is one way and other days it’s different.
I got into the lazy habit of using # are it was easier to find than “”

I was just playing. It's hard to convey actual humor in text, I figured the context would've done it.

P.S. generally if something I type can be interpreted as hostile or as light humor, the latter is probably more accurate.

 

[Original katomi]

TWX no probs, I had not realised that I was doing it so much. No offence taken

 

[snowbear]

If I asked you to pass me my canon DSLR 600d camera.
I would say #Ron can you pass me the 600d, please.#

I didn't know hastags had come into such common use.

They are not hash tags, they are sharps.

 

[limr]

If I asked you to pass me my canon DSLR 600d camera.
I would say #Ron can you pass me the 600d, please.#

I didn't know hastags had come into such common use.

They are not hash tags, they are sharps.

Pound key

And sorry, I have to say it, but 'shutter speed' is not an idiom. Idioms are not literal. Shutter speed is. The time the shutter stays open depends on the speed at which the shutter moves.

 

[TWX]

If I asked you to pass me my canon DSLR 600d camera.
I would say #Ron can you pass me the 600d, please.#

I didn't know hastags had come into such common use.

They are not hash tags, they are sharps.

Pound key

1477 and 941 Hz...

 

[Derrel]

Shutter speed is not idiomatic. The speed control wheel or dial or ring or LCD DISPLAY is clearly marked, and has been for around a century.

Is someone describing how to get artistic, flowing panning shots using an idiomatic expression when he tells you to, "Use a slower-than-normal shutter speed"? No. Not at all.

Shutter speed is a long-accepted term in English. It is a perfectly correct way of describing the time value used to make an exposure. The speed can range from hours, to minutes, to seconds, to incredibly brief fractions of a second such as 1/8000 second. EXPOSURE TIME and Exposure Duration and shutter speed and shutter time are four ways to describe the same thing. I have read all four, in books and articles written over the past 80 years, and I have heard all four terms in real life over the past 45 years.

 

[Derrel]

Each setting on the actual camera dial or control ring is called a "speed". In a mechanism we sometimes have "speeds". On the early Leica cameras we had what was called the slow-speed dial, which was the early way of doing shutter speeds, with a slow-speed dial and a fast-speed dial.Each individual time value is called a "speed". In an automobile with a manual or "standard transmission, in the past it was common to have a "three-speed". In the 1940s and 1950s the "three-speed" manual transmission was the most-common style and was sometimes referred to as ," three on the tree", which was by the mid-1960s largely supplanted by the "four on the floor". In more recent decades we have seen 5-and 6-speed transmissions in consumer vehicles

If you are looking for the term shutter speed and its origin, I would again suggest looking at early Leica literature and how they describe the slow speed dial. Each individual shutter time value is called a "speed" . A numerical value in English can easily be called a speed, and this is correct usage. Witness hand mixers. When you read a cake recipe, the directions might say, " beat on high speed for two minutes.

 

[limr]

 

[dennyr]

Hey everyone!

Not being a native English speaker, I often wonder where the term shutter speed comes from.
In German, we say "Belichtungszeit" which would translate to exposure time - which is rather logical and found in the EXIF data.

But where does the rather misleading "shutter speed" come from? I could only imagine these are from rotary shutters of movie cameras. But as far as I know, they rotate at the same speed.

Any historians here in the group?

No big secret, it is very simple.
1/500 is FASTER than 1/250