How to Blur Water

One of the coolest things about using a tripod is not just getting sharp images, but also being able to BLUR moving objects at the same time... To blur things like water, you need two critical elements, STABILITY and DARKNESS. Stability mostly comes from a tripod, and I highly recommend buying one. But that's a whole different topic... Darkness mostly comes from, well, night time! However, you can "fake" night time simply by using a dark filter called a neutral density filter, which reduces the amount of light passing through it to the camera sensor / film... (Polarizing filters also help; but not as much as a true neutral density filter...)

If for some reason you don't have a tripod yet, ;-) ...fear not! You can always use a table, or a rock, or anything stationary. You might scratch up your camera a bit, and you won't have nearly as much versatility as a tripod, but in a pinch it can work...

(For a shot like this, of course, a tripod was the only way to go...)

I intentionally under-exposed THIS image so that you could get an idea of how bright the light was when I took this exposure. The sun had already set, in fact I think it had set at leat 30 minutes before. So, it wasn't so dark that I needed a flashlight, but it was dark enough to start blurring water, that's for sure!

Alright, let's go over EXACTLY how this image was made. First, you can see the time and place it was taken, by looking at the photo above. (By the way, I can't really recommend leaving your tripod un-attended like that when it is set up on SAND. The legs of a tripod, unless they have little ski-pole thingies on them, will sink right into the sand as waves wash over them! This also creates a problem with stability, and quite a few pictures were blurred to make this ONE shot... Now you know!) Alright, SETTINGS: SHUTTER SPEED: The most important setting is of course the shutter speed. A good shutter speed for blurring things is about 1-30 seconds One second won't blur water very much though, unless it is very fast moving water. 30 seconds however will blur even the stillest of streams etc. This shot was a 30 second exposure, so a wave had time to wash in, wash around the rocks, and the wash back out to sea... ISO, APERTURE: To achieve a slow shutter speed, I need to leverage the two OTHER camera settings in my favor- The camera's sensitivity, (aka ISO) and the lens' aperture. I set my camera's sensitivity as low as it could go, which for this camera is 200. I set the lens' aperture at a relatively "small" setting, f/11 or f/16. Click HERE to go to the aperture tutorial! If I had shot with my camera's sensitivity all the way up at 800 or 1600, and if I had "opened up" my lens' aperture to f/2.8 or f/4, I would never have been able to use a 30 sec. shutter speed.

You don't just have to blur water, either. Here I blurred a San Fransisco trolley car! This shot was taken at least 30-60 minutes after sunset. The foreground was pretty dark when I was exposing the sky correctly, so I waited until a trolley went through and it kinda lit everything up while also leaving a light trail. By now you can tell that some things tend to "disappear" when you blur them. Why? Because they just weren't bright enough to be more than a faint ghost of a blur. People walking through a photo are the best example of this, because they will almost completely disappear if they are continually moving through the picture. Unless of course they're holding a flashlight, in which case the flashlight will show up very nicely as a streak of light, just like the lights on the trolley here... Nikon D70, 50mm, Tripod. Shutter Speed: 10 sec. ISO: 200 Aperture: f/11

Here, I blurred some flowers. Many photographers wouldn't even dream of making this photo if the wind were moving the flowers even the slightest bit, because of course the general concept is that you should always have your subject in sharp focus. But I've never been one for rules, I guess...

I shot this image on film many years ago, so I'm not quite sure about the camera settings, but by now you might be able to roughly guess at them-

Nikon N65, Fuji slide film, Tripod.
Shutter Speed: It looks like it was about 30 seconds.
ISO: 100
Aperture: Probably f/11 or f/16

Lastly, and DEFINITELY not least, CLOUDS are a ton of fun to blur!

They have to be moving pretty quickly though, if you want to blur them with the typical 30 sec. shutter speed that most DSLR's can readily shoot at.

This image took about 5 minutes to make, for example, and 5 minutes is NOT a shutter speed I can simply set on my camera! Getting this shot involved a bit more advanced settings and knowledge than we have time for here... In fact I have to admit it's not just one image, it's three vertical images that were stitched on the computer. So things are getting pretty tricky at this point! Hopefully this tutorial has stimulated your curiosity and given you the resolve to to keep on learning and improving.