A photograph is a record of what transpired during the window of time its shutter was allowed to stay open. I usually leave mine open for about a tenth of a second. I wanted to know how unusual that actually is, and since every digital photograph stores its own shutter speed, I used a Python script to read the shutter speeds of about 60,000 photographs on Wikimedia Commons.
Where everyday photographs fall
Each point on this chart is a single photograph, placed according to how long its shutter stayed open. The fast exposures on the left are drawn sharp and the slow ones on the right are drawn soft, the way a slow shutter would render them, and the shaded area marks the speeds where most of my own work sits.
Cameras honor the shutter dial
Here the same photographs are split by the kind of device that took them. Camera exposures pile up in bright lines at the standard speeds a camera steps through, the ones on a shutter dial such as 1/60, 1/125 and 1/250 and the third-stops in between, while phone exposures spread out into a haze because a phone is free to pick any value in between.
Slow photographs have become rarer
This chart shows the share of each year’s photographs that were taken at the slow end, for cameras and for phones.
It used to take hours
Before digital cameras, photographs didn’t carry their shutter speed with them, so what we know about early exposures comes from museums, archives and camera makers. Each row here is one documented exposure, and where the sources disagree, the bar stretches to cover both figures. The shaded band shows where nine out of ten photographs in the sample fall.
Sources for each documented exposure
| Year | Photograph or process | Exposure | Sources |
|---|
Here is where each of my photographs sits
Under each is its shutter speed and how many photographs in the sample were faster.