Someone asked on Flickr how you get waterblur in your photographs.
You can go into aperture priority stick and stop down to f/22 to get waterblur, but you are hitting the diffraction limits of the lens and losing sharpness. (Remember, if you have a polarizer hanging around, it doubles as an 2-stop ND filter. If you have a pocket digital camera, your sunglasses can be a filter in a pinch.)
3 exposures (2.5″, 0.6″, 1/6″) (Nikon D70) ƒ22, iso 200, 12mm (18mm), 81A + polarizer, tripod
ND filters and a tripod are your best bet. A neutral-density (ND) filter allows you to experiment with waterblur on a sunny day:
3 exposures (3″, 1.3″, 1/4″) (Nikon D70) ƒ16. iso 200, 12mm (18mm), vari-ND, tripod
You actually don’t need an amazing slow shutter speed to get a decent blur. The rule of thumb here a photo at 1/30 or 1/60 will be the same blur as your eye. So anything an order of magnitude faster will “stop” the shot and an order of magnitude slower (say on the order of a second) will blur it.
(Nikon D70, 12-24mm f/4G) ƒ18, iso360, .8sec, 14mm (21mm), tripod, sidekick, Vari-ND.
You might want to purchase a variety of ND filter densities. Instead of this, I use a Singh-Ray Vari-ND filter—it’s not cheap. Since it is two stacked linear polarizers and a half wave plate, it’s not small and I get some vignetting on my 12-24mm @ 12mm. Also, if you dial it up too much, the whole photo gets some weird red shifting in a “+” pattern down the center.
(Nikon D70, Nikkor 12-24mm f/4G, UV) f/4 at 1/1250 second, iso 200, 12mm (19mm)
One parting tip: Don’t trust your metering system. Why? Because the metering system samples too fast and doesn’t see the waterblur. This means inevitably it will tend to overexpose and you will be left with some seriously blown out highlights where the water flows. Either underexpose by a 1/2 stop or, better yet, take multiple exposures and use contrast blending or HDR to recover the blown highlights from the shot.
(Casio EX-750) ƒ2.8, 1/40 sec, iso ?, 8mm (38mm), flash
Again, absolutely amazing photos. Thanks for sharing them!
@J. Star: Thanks for the compliment, I really appreciate it! I did some small revisions the the article that I hope improved it a little bit. I hope they help.