Shutter speed to prevent handheld camera shake
Posted to: Photography
I'm shooting handheld at 200mm on a 1.5x crop sensor. What shutter speed should I use to avoid camera shake? Do you just multiply by the crop factor and double for safety?
Example: 200mm focal length x 1.5x crop sensor = 300 x 2 = 600, so 1/600 (ish) shutter speed?
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19d ago
There's no hard rule saying you have to double the shutter speed, but it doesn't hurt, especially if your hands a bit shaky by default or your camera doesn't have stabilization.
A good baseline for handheld is still the old "1 over focal length" rule, but on a crop sensor you want to factor that in. So at 200mm on a 1.5x crop, you're effectively dealing with about 300mm. That puts your minimum safe shutter speed around 1/300.
From there, bumping it faster for real-world conditions makes sense. Handheld, breathing, not perfectly steady, maybe a little caffeine in the system. Going to around 1/500 or 1/640 is a solid safety margin, and 1/600 or so is right in that sweet spot.
If your lens or body has stabilization, you can sometimes get away with slower shutter speeds. If your subject is moving, you'll want faster speeds anyway. But for general handheld shooting at 200mm on APS-C, aiming around 1/500–1/640 is a very reasonable call and lines up with how most people actually shoot in practice.