Feeling the need for speed? Try slowing down

    You're taking a photo of something that's moving, and you want to convey a sense of speed, even if the subject isn't moving quickly.

    The quickest and best way to do this is to slow down your shutter speed, which will cause the moving subject to blur in its line of motion and create the illusion that it is moving quickly even if it's moving relatively slowly.

    In this picture taken near the Northern Pacific Railway Museum in Toppenish, Wash., I got a freight train going past the old depot that houses the museum. At this point, the train is passing through town and just went over a rail crossing, so it's only going about 25 mph. Not terribly fast.

    But I set my ISO to 100 and stopped down to f-29, which gave me a shutter speed of 1/5 of a second. That caused the train to blur significantly as it went down the rails, while the depot and lamp post remain clear, helping further sell the concept.

    (In case you're wondering, I actually hand-held this photo as it was a relatively spur-of-the-moment shot. Since I don't drink coffee, my hands are fairly steady. But a tripod would not hurt, especially if you want to use even slower shutter speeds.)

Doing long exposures without a tripod or neutral-density filters

    In the last entry, I told you how to make a variable neutral-density filter so you can get long-exposure photos even in broad daylight.

    Now, I'll show you how to do it without using a filter, or even a tripod for that matter. I found this tip on Digital Photography School, and I found it works beautifully for the most part.

    I'll give you the tl;dr version of the article: Take multiple pictures of a scene, load them into Photoshop as layers, convert them into a smart object and then set your stack mode to "mean", which will cause the moving elements to blur, giving you the long-exposure effect you're looking for.

    Here's an example I did. If you're a fan of "Twin Peaks," you'll recognize Snoqualmie Falls.

I shot this with a shutter speed of 1/6 of a second, and while it blurs the water somewhat, it wasn't what I was hoping for. So, I took about 11 more pictures, with the same setting and then merged them.

This is the finished result.

    As you can see the water has a much smoother effect that would normally be the result of a much longer exposure than I could have got under the existing conditions. It is more of what I was looking for.

    So now you have another tool you can use when you want to get a long-exposure effect.