What is a leaf shutter? If you started in photography under a decade ago, we’re pretty sure you may not know the answer to this question. Even if you started in digital a decade ago, you might not know what a leaf shutter is. But these types of shutters are mostly absent from cameras these days. However, for the last decade, photographers clamored for them. Leaf shutters have advantages for photographers, but as time has gone on those advantages mostly disappeared.

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Table of Contents

What Is a Leaf Shutter?

Little to No Camera Shake

A Faster Flash Sync

A Quieter Camera

The Leaf Shutter and the Modern Point and Shoot Camera

What Is a Leaf Shutter?

Having a leaf shutter means that the shutter is in the lens. When film was dominant, there were a few cameras with leaf shutters. The Mamiya 6 and Mamiya 7 series cameras used leaf shutters, as did many point-and-shoot cameras.

The leaf shutter is the opposite of the focal plane shutter, which has the shutter right in front of the film plane or the camera sensor. The focal-plane shutter is built into the camera instead. Modern cameras can be confused as having leaf shutters because the shutter opens up, adjusts itself, and then opens back up at times. But that’s not the case; the shutter is still built into the camera.

Leaf shutters have a few distinct advantages. But some of them are moot at this point in technology.

“These lenses are specialized. Modern leaf shutter lenses are handmade by small, employee-owned companies, not mass produced on assembly lines. Not everyone on the block shoots with them. And their price is a direct reflection of quality. You get what you pay for. When it comes to using them with high resolution medium format cameras of the highest quality, you want to pair them with a lens that is sharp lens with amazing clarity to boot. You would’t put cheap tires on an Indy car.” – Why Leaf Shutters Matter

Little to No Camera Shake

With a leaf shutter, you’re not getting a whole lot of swing or shake. When a camera’s shutter fires, it can cause a shake. But with a leaf shutter, it’s very gentle. For years, this was a great advantage. It’s one of the many reasons the Fujifilm X100 series of cameras took off. The leaf shutter, colors, and style of the camera made professionals really want it. These days, the benefits have been pretty much superseded. Lots of cameras have image stabilization built into the sensor and the lens. We can make a very strong argument for 10 stops of image stabilization outdoing the camera shake negation a leaf shutter can achieve.

If you’re still shooting film, leaf shutters are amazing. If you’ve ever fired a Pentax 67, you probably understand why. There’s a certain romance to the sound of that big, loud shutter on the legendary Pentax camera. But you probably also know how difficult it can be to shoot with. Of course, there are leaf shutter options for the Pentax 67. But, they’re very expensive. At that point, you’re better off trying to score a Mamiya 7 or Mamiya 7 II. You’ll lose the whole through-the-lens viewing experience, but you’ll get more stability.

If you’re using a modern or vintage point-and-shoot camera with a fixed lens, then you’re also going to experience a leaf shutter. The well-known Yashica GSN Electro 35 sports an electronic leaf shutter.

A Faster Flash Sync

Faster flash sync is a great advantage of the leaf shutter. To understand why this is important, you need to understand how flash works. So we’re going to break it down.

Shutter speed controls ambient light’s effect on the scene

Aperture controls the output of the flash power in TTL flash mode. In manual mode, the aperture controls how much of the flash’s light output affects the scene.

ISO controls the overall sensitivity of the scene to both ambient light and flash output lighting.

Obvious...