I have a question that hopefully some of you more advanced photographers can answer/help me out here. I have a Canon T1i and I have been trying to do long exposures on water falls to get that smooth flowing effect and it seems that all I get is white out photo's on anything over 1.5 second. I tried everything, even bracketing exposures on every setting I have but I still get white out effect on any exposure over 1.5 seconds. What am I doing wrong or am I not using the right settings? It's aggravating to spend the amount of time setting up on a tripod and hoping that I can get the shot that I trying for. The lens I'm using is a Canon 18-55mm macro.

Thank you

Steve

Steve, you can't just change your exposure without changing anything else, and still expect the image to be exposed correctly.

You should be using the camera's lowest ISO, and preferably an Fstop no smaller than F11 - since diffraction will rob sharpness as you make the aperture smaller. No matter what, the exposure settings must be correct.

It sounds as if you have hit the limits of your camera body You can't shoot at a low enough ISO to allow a slower (longer) exposure time. A neutral density filter will block out additional light and provide more flexibility with ISO, and still give you a slow enough shutter speed to get the effect you are after.

I use two ND filters - a 400 and a 32. In dark light, the 32 which cuts light by 5 stops is great. But in bright daylight, even the 400, which lowers your light by a little over 8 fstops, sometimes comes up short. I sometimes put them both on a lens to get the desired effect. Depending on how close you are to the water, you will need anywhere from 6 secs (for a far distance), to 1 sec if you are very close.

Set your camera to spot meter, and let the camera measure your water. Dial in +1 to +2 exposure compensation - and you should be good to go. The water should be bright, but so much that you overexpose it. The rest of the image will be dark, but if you shoot raw (and this is an excellent situation for this) you will have more flexibility raising the darker levels in the image without losing the highlight areas.

I hope that you are taking a meter reading off the water which could easily be the brightest part of the scene.
I do that in manual mode, compensate the exposure for the bright area and then shoot at a small lens opening to reduce the shutter speed (reciprocity).
I usually use a polarizer filter at maximum polarization for the 2 stops filter factor. That is usually enough for me to have the effect I like but wanting to go to that "silky effect" then a ND filter, like a 4 stops factor is more appropriate.
Begin by taking the meter reading off the water which is easily done using center weighted or spot metering.