Do you know what’s happening inside your DSLR every time you press down on the shutter button? Maybe the answer is yes, but chances are good you’ve never actually seen it happen with your own eyes.

Well, thanks to YouTube’s The Slow Mo Guys, now you can… and it’s absolutely fascinating. In the seven minute video below, Gavin Free pull back the curtain and shows you how each of your images is captured when you’re shooting at super-fast shutter speeds.

Rolling shutters like this — where a smaller and smaller strip of the sensor is exposed from top to bottom when you capture an image at faster and faster shutter speeds — is the reason we have flash sync speeds associated with cameras.

If your camera’s flash sync speed is 1/200th of a second, that means this is the fastest shutter speed at which the whole sensor is exposed at one time, rather than in a strip from top to bottom. .

It’s also why, when you search rolling shutter on 500px, you stumble across photos like this fascinating image of a airplane propeller by Rob Sheridan:

Check out the video above to see the technical magic of a camera shutter for yourself, and then, if you’ve got your own rolling shutter mishaps to share, upload them to 500px with the hashtag #rollignshuttereffect and drop us a link in the comments!