Last week, I captured some pictures of the Chicago skyline from the Adler Planetarium. This is an iconic scene that's been photographed an endless number of times. My goal was to create something a little different. So, I blended three pictures--all of which were taken at different shutter speeds.

My first picture was taken using conventional settings for this sunny day: shutter speed of 1/500th of a second, f/8, ISO 100

Chicago SkylineChicago skyline from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois on July 1, 2016 The shutter speed of 1/500th of a second freezes the choppy water of Lake Michigan and stops the clouds. I like the image, but experimented further by slowing the shutter speed down to allow more movement within the frame.

This next picture combines three frames using various shutter speeds. For the boats in the harbor (which are quite small in the frame), I used the above picture at the 1/500th shutter speed. Then, I slowed the shutter speed to 45 seconds to allow enough time for the clouds to blow across the frame. Finally, I selected a 5 minute shutter speed to completely smooth out the water in the lake. Here's the combined result:

Chicago SkylineChicago skyline from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois on July 1, 2016 During the conversion to black and white, I boosted the contrast and did some dodging and burning to create more depth within the skyline:

Chicago SkylineChicago skyline from the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, Illinois on July 1, 2016 It's not that one image is necessarily better than the others--but there's no question that the results are quite different even though the pictures were taken at nearly the same time and from the same position (the camera was locked down on a tripod).

I was able to achieve such a long exposure (5 minutes) on a bright summer day by using a very strong neutral density filter. In this case, I attached a 16 stop ND filter to my Nikon 24-70 2.8 lens.

I hope to experiment with similar techniques during my upcoming trip to Mono Lake in California.