If shutter speed has been neglected in all the talks about manual control, what to say about the ISO? Would it not have been in the firmware change log, I doubt many people would have cried. At least for the first few days.

While aperture and shutter speed give creative control over the way you present a scene, the ISO impacts the overall look. Switching from ISO 100 to 400 might be a no brainer if you need more light when taking pictures. On the other hand, if you are editing a clip and interlinking scenes shot at various ISO, the differences will be obvious and viewers will expect it to be done for a reason.

Look consistency in a scene is king and having control over the ISO helps keeping the same look from the start of the scene to the end. This part can already be done with the exposure lock button (*). The new thing here is that you also want to set a predetermined ISO in a case where you have a multi camera setup or in scenes where lighting changes drastically.

Some people might argue that most of the look can be generated during the grading stage but, as with everything, it is always better to do it in camera than in post. You will save yourself a lot of time trying to match clips with each others.

While people keep talking about the creative freedom given by the manual control over aperture, no one is talking about the shutter speed. The only time you hear people talking about it is in the context of the 24fps fiasco, wishing have a 1/48 sec shutter duration.

Well, it makes me sad. Shutter speed is such a creative tool! While you might not perceive the differences between a 1/30 and 1/60 shutters, the new firmware enables us to crank it up to 1/4000sec which is a big difference in look.

At 1/4000sec, each of the 30 frames per second will be sharp. In fact, it will be unnaturally sharp in the case of fast moving subjects. This may be the look you are looking for. If it is not, you will need to introduce some motion blurring in your post processing workflow.

If you don’t have access to [after effects], you can slow down the shutter by reducing the amount of light that is coming in, resulting in a blurry image. I am sure you already guessed how it can be done: by using a stack of ND filters as we have been doing pre firmware update to control the aperture. The difference is that you won’t be neutralizing light to increase the aperture but to slow down the shutter.

Note: while reading my post, it occurred to me that I own a very good photography book which goes in great details about how one can use the shutter speed in creative ways in still photography: Understanding Shutter Speed. It’s from the same guy who wrote Understanding Exposure. Not as much of a classic and mandatory reading as the Exposure one but still worth a read for anyone who wants to learn photography.