Yes – if one uses the correct prompt, it is possible for AI to emulate shutter speed.
MidJourney AI prompt: Freeze frame of a man jumping over a puddle on a city street with the background out of focus. – Don’t count the fingers and why do we have a splash? not a bad touch but what made it?
As mentioned in the previous post about depth of field, the traditional photographer has two main tools to control exposure, aperture and shutter speed. Adjusting the shutter speed adjusts the exposure time and in doing so the resulting image can either freeze time, faster than the eye can see, or blur time (captured light) in long exposures.
Fast Shutter Speeds – Freezing the frame
When I was taught photography, the rule of thumb was an exposure of 1/60 sec was as slow as one should go when capturing without a tripod to avoid resulting in a motion blur to the image. Of course, if your subject is running, or even walking, then this will still be too slow. For sport and action, a photographer won’t be thinking less than 1/1000 sec.
It is said that before photography, we did not know if there was a point when all four legs of a horse left the ground, the point was proved in the 19th Century motion studies by Eadweard Muybridge.
Animated gif of 16 still photographs of a horse in motion taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1887. The example also shows how film is created using still frames – traditionally at 24fps (frames per second).
MidJourney AI prompt: freeze frame of a horse galloping where all 4 feet don’t touch the ground , photograph , Eadweard Muybridge – Not many instances of 4 feet and it is missing the key shot where all the horse’s legs are tucked underneath it. I must admit I didn’t expect to receive a contact sheet like this when putting in the prompt!
When I was a child I remember marveling at a photograph by Harold Edgerton , taken in 1964 which showed a fired bullet frozen in time as it was shot through an exploding apple. There is an book of his work published by Steidl called Seeing The Unseen. These high shutter speeds can push the boundary of what we perceive into a powerful single visual moment, particularly when suspending human emotions.
MidJourney AI Prompt: Freeze frame of a bullet after it has exited an exploded apple – No bullet but interesting nevertheless
Slow Shutter Speeds – Long exposures and motion blurs
For slow shutter speeds examples that one might think of would be, the trails of lights from traffic at night, or the swirl of stars across the nights sky. This usually requires some fixed elements which means a long exposure time on a tripod to see parts of the landscape in an often ghostly aura of light and shadow. To freeze a subject and have a motion trail, a photographer is likely to use a flash. I used to spend many hours in the virtual dark with an open shutter creating multiple flash instances of my friends in different parts of a single frame, or just painting by light.
MidJourney AI Prompt: long exposure of lights at night – I cropped part of the top.
What are the AI prompts to use for Shutter Speed ?
Well, after my previous experiments I have great doubt that AI will understand what 1/5000 of a second is, any better than it did with f1.4. The next guess would be to try typical photographic terms: short exposure ; long exposure. Finally, my assumption, is using a more natural language approach will be the best. Frozen, of course, can also refer to temperature, therefore, frozen in time, might result in the unexpected. Blur could be safer, motion blur? …. Let’s see how it gets on…
Contrary to my expectations , “freeze frame” worked reasonable well (see top two examples). None of the generations had a frozen (ice) element to them.
Midjourney AI Prompt: faster than the eye can see – I wasn’t sure if I would end up with an eye
AI is obviously trained on the cliche, which means a long exposure of lights at night produces the typical traffic lights. Interestingly enough I found adding words like traffic generally focused too heavily on the traffic itself.
MidJourney AI Prompt: long exposure of the lights of busy traffic at night – I asked for busy traffic and it gave it to me, in my head I was asking for the lights.
Creating a long exposure or motion blur proved much more complicated than high shutter speeds. Quite often when referring to an a object, that object becomes sharp. I created several generations of horses galloping across a field using various terms to create motion, which on the whole produced poor results. “Long exposure” was more reliable than most.
MidJourney AI Prompt: long exposure of a horse galloping across a field on an out of focus background.
MidJourney AI Prompt: a horse in a blur of motion – a very simple natural language phrase, which isn’t bad but again AI wants that horse to be sharp.