Blend your shutter speeds

Shoot varying speeds

Try shooting the falls at several different shutter speeds. Start off with a speed around 4 secs with ISO100, then half your shutter speed and double the ISO. Repeat a few more times. We don’t need to worry about increasing noise with higher ISOS, as we’re mainly interested in the blurry areas in these frames.

Choose the best blur

A 1/2 sec shutter speed gives us nice blur in the falls here, but the slower-moving water in the river below looks too detailed and choppy. By contrast, a 4 sec exposure blurs the river water nicely. We can combine the best blur from each frame using compositing skills in Photoshop.

Combine in Photoshop

Open the images you want to use, then go to the faster frame and copy (Cmd/ctrl+c) and paste (Cmd/ctrl+v) into the slowest frame. Use the frame with the lowest ISO as a base on which to blend the others. If the image with the higher ISO looks noisy go to Filter>noise>reduce Noise to improve it.

Mask the frames

To mask your frames hold Alt and click the Add Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel to hide the top layer. Now simply grab the brush tool, set the colour to white, choose a soft-edged brush tip and paint to reveal the better blur in the areas where you want it.