How does flash photography ‘stop motion’ (more than ambient light)

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I don’t understand how using a flash can freeze motion better than ambient light. In the end, isn’t it all just light hitting the sensor?

I don’t understand why it would do this. I mean it’s not necessarily like the camera knows and is like “Oh they’re using flash, I’ll be nice and give them a sharper picture’. I mean obviously they don’t think like that, but all in all it’s light luminating the subject and hitting the sensor, why does something like the source of the light affect how much motion can appear in your image?

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17 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

The sensors in the camera collect light over time. If there is not much light, they can’t collect very much and the picture ends up too dark to see anything. To fix that, the camera can collect light for a longer amount of time until the picture is bright enough to see. However, if the subject of the picture moves during that time, they will appear blurry because the camera collected the light from them in multiple places.

The best solution is to have a lot of light so the camera can collect enough in a very short time, before the subject has a chance to move enough to look blurry.

Modern cameras can sense how much light there is and automatically adjust the amount of time they spent capturing it.

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