We’ve all seen the photos of rivers and waterfalls where the water looks silky smooth, almost a blur. Well, it’s not almost a blur, it is a blur. Not because the water is moving particularly fast, but because the shutter speeds are very slow.
To get those silky smooth blurry water shots, you’ll need to get familiar with your camera’s shutter priority settings. That would be the “Tv” setting on your Canon dial and the “S” mode on Nikon.
There are many instances where you’ll want to use Shutter Priority, it’s handy for a lot of different types of shooting. It’s probably the program mode I use more than any other besides CA (Creative Auto) on my Canon. You’ll use either Shutter Priority or Manual for most strobe lighting situations, unless your external flash is compatible with your camera’s eTTL system. It’s also the setting you’d use when photographing objects moving very fast at air shows or racing events. And it’s the setting to use for getting blurry water shots in a stream.
You’ll need a moving stream will a little bit of fall and a tripod. Once you have your scene framed, select a shutter speed of 1/125th of a second or faster, if you want the freeze the water. For the blurry effect, start with a shutter speed of an ⅛ or ¼ of a second and go longer from there, all the way up to two or three seconds.
Surprisingly, an object doesn’t have to be moving very fast to get the blurry background effect. If you’re trying to make a car look like it’s going fast, it doesn’t have to be moving much faster than a slow walk to make a car look like it’s speeding along with a slow shutter speed.
Just like with water in a moving stream, you can get the blurry effect with ocean waves. When done right it actually looks really cool, almost like mist over the ocean, but that takes some really long shutter times, three or four seconds. For many modern DSLRs that means working right up until it’s almost dark.