5Diii silent mode - affect on speed

futureal33

futureal33

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Hi all,

I know the easy answer to this question is "do it yourself and find out" but I wondered if anyone else had been there and would be willing to share their thoughts/experience.

I am shooting a Christening this weekend, and have been told the vicar can be a bit funny about camera's during the service. Flash is a definite no-no and having recently heard stories about photographers being asked to demonstrate how loud their shutter is before being given approval to shoot, I am wondering if shooting in silent mode might be a good idea!!

I have tried silent mode in my house, experimenting with it, and it seems really, well silent!
However I have read some threads where photographers have said the silent mode slows down the shutter speed, and could induce motion blur / shake.
As the church is pretty dark (metering at ISO 6400, f2.8, 1/100th) obviously I cant afford much by way of shutter speed variation.

So, just wondering if anyone has any opinion on what silent mode does to shutter speed?

Thanks :)

Ps - I intend to try this out myself tonight anyway, just wondering if anyone else has previously.
 
However I have read some threads where photographers have said the silent mode slows down the shutter speed, and could induce motion blur / shake.
Click to expand...
What nonsense! How could it affect shutter speed?
It will affect the burst rate (fps) though.
 
Quite the opposite - it works a bit like stabiliser, although I can only comment about 1D mkIII. The mirror slap is dampened, and less likely to cause shake at slow speeds.

You will obviously lose quite a lot of fps, but since you are not shooting a sporting event it should hardly matter.
 
I agree with the above that what you’ve read is utter nonsense.

When you take a pic in normal mode the shutter will:

Open <1/100th sec exposure> Close

But when in silent mode it will:

Ooppeenn <1/100th sec exposure> Cclloossee

Basically the mirror will operate slower to dampen the noise but the actual shutter exposure will remain as you expect it to.

We&#8217;re only talking minor fractions of a second so I don&#8217;t see it affecting your photography at all. As mentioned above, you&#8217;d only be affected if you were attempting a fast burst of photos.
 
How's about this for a concept. You are so used to how your camera works that you can hold it up, quickly steady it, AF/AE and snap, then you lower/move your camera ready for next shot and get used to doing it really really quickly. If you are so used to it taking X <time>, if it then takes X+Y <time plus slower mirror action>, then maybe you could be moving the camera whilst the shutter is still open and causing the blur yourself?
 
I tried my 5D3 on silent last week when I was shooting some birds in the local woods. First thing I did notice was indeed how quiet it really is, but that's about all I did notice. It didn't stop me taking shots at up to 640/800, it just took a fraction of a second before it was ready for the next shot, which was still a lot quicker than I was. I didn't burst shoot but did take rapid shots without a problem. I would dare bet that for the Christening the only thing you'd notice was how quiet it is and you wouldn't miss any shots that you're after.
 
That doesn't make sense silent mode will impact fps but not shutter speed. I shot a christening last weekend too in similar condition and silent mode was useful to say the least.

Andy
 
Andrew, the shutter operates at the same speed whether your shooting on silient or not but the time taken from shutter release to mirror closed again is longer - hence you have a slower overall shot time and less fps.
 
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