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Reciprocity and Reciprocity Failure

Reciprocity is the interchange of shutter speed and aperture. This rather posh word just means that a combination of a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second with an aperture of f8, which is referred to as an exposure setting of '1/125th at f8', will give the same exposure to the film or digital sensor as 1/250th at f5.6, which is the same as 1/500th at f4 etc. This reciprocity works well, up to a point, but film users will find that, when you have very long exopsure times, several seconds or so, the reciprocity breaks down and extra exposure time is neccessary to compensate. This is known as reciprocity failure.

Submitted by: Geoff Posted on: April 19,2007

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