I’m sure that you’ve seen a photograph of an athlete frozen in a moment of time. Maybe you’ve even seen such photos of some of our UMB athletes recently! In another case, you may have also seen an artistic photograph of an object with some blur to emphasize the motion. The difference between the two lies in the concept of shutter speed.
So, what is shutter speed? To put it simply, shutter speed is the amount of time a camera opens up to expose the sensor to light before closing. A sensor is found in all digital cameras (yes, even your phone) and its job is to record the light that touches it so that the camera can produce an image. The more you decrease the speed of the shutter, the more the time in which the sensor is exposed increases. So, if you want to expose the shutter for a longer period of time, you’ll want a slower shutter speed.  
Earlier, I mentioned two possible types of photographs that you may have seen before. In the first example, I proposed a photo of an athlete mid-action. For a photo of something that is moving quickly, like an athlete or a ball, you wouldn’t want to extend your shutter speed for a long period of time. This is because getting a really crisp display of the object in motion, needs to be taken in light for a very short moment of time. So, you’d want a shutter speed that is relatively fast – maybe even a minuscule fraction of a second (e.g. 1/2000 of a second).
On the flip side, if you would actually like to drag out the motion and give it some blur for artistic or other reasons, you may want to do the opposite. Perhaps you want a picture of a fast moving object, such as a train or a car, and you want to show the viewer that it is moving quickly by allowing it to blur a bit. In this situation, you probably won’t want to use a shutter speed as fast as the previous example. Instead, you may want to slow it down to a half a second, or maybe even several seconds, depending on how much you want to exaggerate the blur of motion.
Another time this concept can be applied is in situations with poor lighting. For example, if you want to shoot a picture of the night sky, in order to get enough light into the camera to make an image you need to slow down your shutter speed; in some cases, you may need to extend your shutter speed to thirty seconds or more!
If this concept of shutter speed is interesting to you, give a try with your own camera by switching to shutter priority mode (Tv on the camera dial)! If you only have a phone camera, you can download apps that allow you to control the phone manually, changing the shutter speed as you go!