In photography the shutter-release button is a button found on many cameras, used to take a picture. When pushed, the shutter of the camera is "released", so it opens to capture a picture, and then closes, permitting an exposure time as determined by the shutter speed setting. Some cameras also utilise an electronic shutter, instead of a mechanical shutter.

The shutter-release button is among the simplest features of a hand-held camera. When you press the shutter button the camera goes through a sequence of set-up events so as to get all its electronics prepared. Just when these events are finished the camera can capture the photograph. The time that it takes for the camera to finish these events can alter but is sometimes around one second or so. When taking successive pictures there's an additional delay because of the camera compacting the photograph and writing it to the slow flash memory. Though a circa one second delay doesn't appear long it can make the difference between capturing an action photograph to missing it.

Some cameras will also initiate a focus action when the shutter button is held down and will only take the photo when the focus is finished. This can add rather more delay. Although it's impossible to get rid of the shutter delay in your camera there are just a few practices that will help avoiding its results. As an example many cameras include a burst mode. In burst mode the camera shoots a fast series of images for so long as the shutter button is held down or till the camera's memory is full. In this mode the camera writes the photos to a non permanent memory which is extraordinarily fast but little.

When the memory is full or the shutter button released the camera starts the slow process of writing the photos to the flash memory. Using the burst mode you can shoot fast photos of an action event and then select the one which best caught the events. The speed and the quantity of photographs that the burst mode supports alter between cameras. Some high end cameras can take as much as ten photographs over the course of a second. Another delay that's a result of the digicam technology is the opening delay. Most cameras will enter into a standby mode if not utilized for a certain quantity of time. This time can change but it is often in the range of a few minutes.
 
When the camera goes into standby mode it turns off the majority of its electronics to save power. Typically pressing the shutter button will restart the camera but such a restart process is long and can take a couple of seconds. The result's a longer delay when taking a photo after the camera was idle for some considerable time. To avoid this you would need to make sure your camera is turned on and doesn't go into standby mode when taking positive steps pictures. Some cameras permit you to disable the automated standby feature through a menu option. If your camera doesn't permit you can keep it on by pressing the shutter button halfway down now and then. The drawback of leaving the camera on all of the time is wasting battery power. To maximise battery life-span in such eventualities you can disable the camera's LCD screen which consumes a large amount of energy and use the view finder instead. An alternate way to reduce the shutter delay is to bypass the automated focus process which generally starts when the shutter button is held down. A way to do that is to hold the shutter button 1/2 way down.

In most cameras the result will be an one time focus process and then a focus lock. The camera will stay in focus and when the shutter is totally pushed it'll take a photograph without re-focusing. Another choice is to put the camera in manual focus. It requires practice to begin to know your camera and to get a sense of the setbacks it introduces. Though there is not any way to absolutely lose the setbacks you can master beating them by practicing taking action photographs. New high end professional cameras have an especially short delay and as the electronics improve cameras will dump the shutter delay altogether.