How do you get that smooth look when shooting moving water during a bright sunny day? Most cameras in a regular automatic mode will get a photo like this when you take a picture of a water fall:
This photo was shot, hand held, with an aperture of f11, and a shutter speed of 1/80 at ISO 200. You can get a slightly slower shutter speed by changing to ISO 100, and going to a smaller aperture. But once you start going slower, step one is to put your camera on a tripod. You can also add a neutral density filter to the lens of your camera to block out some light. These filters don’t change the color cast at all, but act like sunglasses for your camera Then use your lowest ISO, and as small an aperture as possible.
When you start using extremely slow shutter speeds any camera movement is going to cause blurring in your image. While you are looking for blurring in the water, you want everything else tack sharp. So you need to avoid that movement. A solid tripod is essential. You also want to be careful pressing the shutter release on the camera. Even that can cause some movement. One tip, use your camera’s timer. Turn on the timer, compose your shot, press the shutter release and take your hands off the camera to wait. A remote shutter release is another option. I have a remote shutter release cable that I use for this purpose.
With a neutral density filter on the camera, this next photo was taken with a 1 second shutter speed, at f32 using ISO 100. Still not the slowest shutter speed you may want for a shot of moving water, but enough to smooth out the water quite a bit. I don’t have the darkest filter, so in this case a darker filter that keeps out more light would have been better.