Pretty As A Picture - Shutter Speed

So we've come to the second post in It's Overflowing's week-by-week photography course and this time it's all about shutter speed. It's pretty straightforward, but something that I didn't know before starting the course was that the faster the shutter speed, the less light allowed in. Makes sense but it's something I had never really thought about prior to reading her post.
I also didn't know what the numbers actually meant, so that's something else I've learnt. Just goes to show, you learn something new every day!
In her post she recommended taking photos of a dripping tap to practice with different shutter speeds. Well once again I had Baby Z on my lap so I took photos of the closest, most convenient item: the ceiling fan. It actually worked pretty well for this exercise. I knew what to expect (it's just shutter speed afterall, not like using white balance for the first time!) but I was still surprised at how using the 1/80 speed was fast enough to nearly freeze the fan blades, which was on the highest setting. My camera/lens combo I used could go right up to 1/4000 so I'm curious to see how a photo of something at that speed would turn out (with decent enough lighting of course!).
Before I put up my results I just want to quickly explain that I didn't have great lighting for these shots. In fact, I'm not particularly focusing on getting great lighting or great shots for now, I just want to learn how to use each feature on its own (and understand how it works/what it does) before I begin putting them together...although I do play around with the settings at other times. So the first lot of photos I'm putting up are the original shots, no editing whatsoever. The second lot of photos are the same photos but brightened up with Photoshop so you can actually see what the photos are of! Plus, I find it interesting to see the amount of light let in in each photo as the shutter speed was changed.

Not only can you see the differences in the obvious such as amount of blur from the fan blades and lighting, but you can see the clarity and sharpness of the image improving as the lens is allowed open for longer. Guess that's part of the whole letting in more light thing.

The next post is about ISO. She recommends doing this one outside in lots of natural light, so I may take a couple of days to come back with my results from this one as I don't get a lot of time outside at the moment!