turn camera to manual settings, thus this making a elimination of a tripod. have enough distance that is recomended for you lens focus meaning if your lens has a minimum of 6inches distance to get anything in focus thus being closer means out of focus, this should be in your booklet that came with camera. second we fall in to F/stops and Shutter speed.
F-stop is the mesurement of how big you open the iris of the camera to let light in for exposure, think of it like your eye, when in darkness your pupil will open to let more light in to see better just like astronomy that it takes a wider lens/telescope to see farther and more detail pictures, when your in bright light your pupil closes to let less amount of light in so everything is not over expose do to. to much light (like looking into the sun). f-stop ranges depending on camera from 1.8 to 22 or 2.0 to 48 etc, example 2.0-4.0-5.6-8.0-11-22 etc. the lower the f-stop the more open is the iris/pupil thus letting in more light, the higher number of f-stop is closing the iris/pupil thus letting less light come thru. this is for setting up your exposure correclty, and the correct exposure is where you can see details in the blacks and detials in the whites, this means in the darkest spots of the image within your frame, you can see some details and in the brightest spots of your image within your frame you can see details too, keep in mind that this now comes into play how synsitive your chip is on a digital camera and or on your film camera, but this is now going into way to much information to cover.
shutter speed is how long do you keep that iris/pupil open to let the light thru it thus giving you exposure. if you close your eyes and open them for ten seconds you will see everything that the world has to offer including motion within that ten second image, thus this means that when you take a longer exposure you will get the motion of things moving around in your image thus making this blurry and out of focus. now if you close your eyes and open them for a tenth of a second you will most likely not see motion, more like a still image because you didnt open your eyes long enough to capture some motion. having said that the faster you open the iris of the camera the more you will freeze a subject of interest, this method is use for capture sports and fast moving objects, when you see pictures of the city with streaking headlights and braking lights of cars and moving objects this is with lower speeds of shutter speed thus making it more time to capture motion. the shutter speeds are range of:
10-30-60-120-240-500-750-1000-1500-2000-3000 etc the higher the number the faster the shutter speed (iris/pupil) will open and shut, creating a freeze frame of motion objects.
the lower shutter speed number means a slower longer time of the iris/pupil opening and closing thus capturing everything in motion.
keep in mind that f-stop and shutter speed work together and creating a perfect exposure, the higher shutter speed means you need to open the f-stop more to let more light in since there is little time for light to go thru, thus this means youll need to either be in a brighter setting your light the object brighter.
here are some examples of capturing high shutter speed subjects moving atleast at 100mph but freezing it to one frame:
here are some examples of slow shutter speeds and high shutter speeds side by side:
