You’ve seen them, those amazing photos of dynamic action frozen. They can look pretty darned tricky to create and even mystical, but the truth is that they’re just photo wizardry that you can learn how to do yourself with a little practice.

In simple terms, your camera high speed shutter is a small gate that opens and closes to let light into your sensor. The longer this gate is open, the longer your exposure and the more motion blur you’ll get in the shot. But what if you wanted to keep the gate open for just a fraction of a second to let light in over a much shorter duration?

Elevating Security and Performance with High-Speed Shutters

Using high speed sync (HSS) is one way to do this. HSS lets you use flash at shutter speeds higher than your camera’s standard sync mode – which typically limits your maximum shutter speed to 1/200th or 1/2000th of a second. To do this your camera and flash both have to support HSS, which is usually marked with a symbol on both the flash and the camera body.

In HSS, the flash fires many times throughout a single shutter traverse, so that the light from these bursts mixes together and gives you the impression of continuous illumination for the whole of your exposure. This works for any flash, whether it’s on a strobe or built into your camera.