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Few photography effects can beat the look of a long exposure, especially the beautiful motion blur you get when shooting moving water with a slow shutter speed. During daylight hours the sort of slow shutter speeds you need can usually only be achieved with the use of a neutral density filter, which slows the flow of light into your camera. But sometimes you can be caught short without a neutral density filter, and the water comes out looking too choppy and detailed. If so, there’s another option. Using a tripod, shoot a series of frames in quick succession of the moving water and then blend the images together afterwards in Affinity Photo.
It helps if the frames you intend to use are shot at your slowest possible speed. Here, our shots were taken with aperture f/16 and ISO100, allowing us to achieve a shutter speed of half a second at sunset. Using a tripod, we captured a set of half second frames. That’s long enough to create a touch of blur in the waves but nowhere near long enough to get the misty water effect you really only see with exposures upwards of 30 seconds.
We’ll begin here by using the Stack feature to blend our frames with a neat trick that averages out the motion in each, then combine two blending methods before adding filters to enhance the blur. Finally, we can bring in parts from our original images to complete the effect. It’s not quite as good as real in-camera motion blur, but it’s the next best thing.
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