Electronic First Curtain Shutter and Bokeh

Monday 22 September 2025, 20:10 by Nando Harmsen | 2,609 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Many mirrorless cameras have an electronic first-curtain shutter. Do you like photographing with an extremely shallow depth of field? Be careful with this feature.

It used to be simple. You had a shutter and that was it. With mirrorless cameras, you can choose, sometimes from three different options. One of them is the electronic first-curtain shutter.

Choose wisely
The mechanical shutter is familiar to all of us. The shutter opens, and closes again. The time between opening and closing is the shutter speed.

The electronic shutter is what we got with mirrorless cameras. The sensor is read out line by line. This takes time, which means the rolling shutter effect can come into play. That is distortion of moving elements in the image.

And then there is the electronic first-curtain shutter, which does exactly what the term says. The shutter speed starts electronically and ends mechanically. I will leave out the specific details for the sake of simplicity.

The electronic first-curtain shutter has a major disadvantage when you like photographing with a shallow depth of field. The appearance of the blur is strongly affected when the shutter speed is very fast.

I did a test to show this. I used an f/1.2 lens to get clear bokeh balls. I set the shutter speed to 1/6400 sec, which you can quickly end up with in practice when shooting at f/1.2.

f/1.2 and 1/6400 sec, electronic first-curtain shutter

It is worth realising that this effect with an electronic first-curtain shutter only occurs at very fast shutter speeds. I made the following series to show this.

f/1.2 and 1/125 sec, electronic first-curtain shutter

As you can see, the effect of cut-off bokeh balls is still present at 1/1000 sec. It is much less noticeable than at 1/8000 sec or 1/6400.

If you keep the shutter speed below 1/1000 sec, the effect will hardly be noticeable any more, or may even be absent. It is something you need to take into account. The bokeh will always suffer from it, though.

Bear in mind that some cameras do not have a fully mechanical shutter or a fully electronic shutter. Or that a mechanical shutter is not possible at all with a particular type of lens, Nikon for example.

Some Nikon lenses do not work with the mechanical shutter. With the Z6 II, you are then left with only the electronic first-curtain shutter.

The effect does not depend on the camera brand or type of lens. It is an effect caused by the way this type of shutter works.

You can prevent this by using a mechanical shutter, or the fully electronic shutter, if available. Also bear in mind the other disadvantages that can occur. You can read more about this in this article.

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