page_title: Camera
section_title: Shutter
hierarchical_section_title: Camera / Mechanics / Exposure control / Shutter
caption_attribution_description: English: A focal plane shutter from a Yashica TL Electro-X. The first curtain release is the tab on the right edge of the silver plate near the top. The second curtain release is the lever at the top, which is usually near an electromagnet in the camera for electric release. The back side is also on commons File:Focal-plane shutter gears.jpg
context_page_description: A camera is an optical instrument used to record images. At their most basic, cameras are sealed boxes with a small hole that allow light in to capture an image on a light-sensitive surface. Cameras have various mechanisms to control how the light falls onto the light-sensitive surface. Lenses focus the light entering the camera, the size of the aperture can be widened or narrowed to let more or less light into the camera, and a shutter mechanism determines the amount of time the photo-sensitive surface is exposed to the light.
  The still image camera is the main instrument in the art of photography and captured images may be reproduced later as a part of the process of photography, digital imaging, photographic printing. The similar artistic fields in the moving image camera domain are film, videography, and cinematography.
  The word camera comes from camera obscura, which means "dark chamber" and is the Latin name of the original device for projecting an image of external reality onto a flat surface. The modern photographic camera evolved from the camera obscura. The functioning of the camera is very similar to the functioning of the human eye.
context_section_description: The shutter, along with the aperture, is one of two ways to control the amount of light entering the camera. The shutter determines the duration that the light-sensitive surface is exposed to light. The shutter is opened, light enters the camera and exposes the film or sensor to light, and then the shutter closes.
  There are two types of mechanical shutters. The leaf-type uses a circular iris diaphragm maintained under spring tension inside or just behind the lens that rapidly opens and closes when the shutter is released.
  More commonly, a focal-plane shutter is used. This shutter operates close to the film plane and employs metal plates or cloth curtains with an opening that passes across the light-sensitive surface. The curtains or plates have an opening that is pulled across the film plane during an exposure. The focal-plane shutter is typically used in single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras, since covering the film rather than blocking the light passing through the lens allows the photographer to view through the image through the lens at all times except during the exposure itself. Covering the film also facilitates removing the lens from a loaded camera (many SLRs have interchangeable lenses).
  Digital cameras may use one of these types of mechanical shutters or they may use an electronic shutter, the type used in the cameras of smartphones. Electronic shutters either record data from the entire sensor at the same time (a global shutter) or record the data line by line across the sensor (a rolling shutter).
  In movie cameras, a rotary shutter opens and closes in sync with the advancing of each frame of film.
  The duration is called the shutter speed or exposure time. The longer the shutter speed, the slower it is. Typical exposure times can range from one second to 1/1,000 of a second, though durations longer and shorter than this are not uncommon. In the early stages of photography, exposures were often several minutes long. These long exposure times often result in blurry images, as a single object is recorded in multiple places across a single image for the duration of the exposure. To prevent this, shorter exposure times can be used. Very short exposure times can capture fast-moving action and completely eliminate motion blur.
  Like aperture settings, exposure times increment in powers of two. The two settings determine the exposure value (EV), a measure of how much light is recorded during the exposure. There is a direct relationship between the exposure times and aperture settings so that if the exposure time is lengthened one step, but the aperture opening is also narrowed one step, the amount of light exposing the film or sensor is the same.
caption: A focal-plane shutter. In this shutter, the metal shutter blades travel vertically.
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