Shutter speed and exposure time of picamera

Question

Is it possible to control the exposure time and shutter speed of raspberry pi camera. If yes, how ?

Answer 1

Yes you can control shutter speed and many other things.

For example

raspistill -ISO 800 -ss 6000000 -o out.jpeg

Will set the ISO 800 and the shutter speed to the maximum 6,000,000 microseconds, or 6 seconds.

Here’s the Raspberry Pi documentation.

Answer 2

You can control the shutter speed in python with the package picamera.

Installation for python 3: sudo apt-get install python3-picamera

Documentation for the shutter speed method: https://picamera.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api_camera.html#picamera.PiCamera.shutter_speed:

shutter_speed

Retrieves or sets the shutter speed of the camera in microseconds.

This example sets the shutter speed at 1000us, captures an image and saves it (all other parameters such as ISO, resolution... are set to default).

import picamera as picam

with picam.PiCamera() as mycam:
    mycam.shutter_speed = 1000 # 1ms
    camera.start_preview()
    camera.capture_sequence(['yourimage.jpg'],use_video_port=True)