What are the uses of Neutral Density (ND) filters?

Apart from silky water effects and pics of crowded places what are other uses of ND filters?

Almost every blog I have read mentions only these two situations. What other uses are their for ND filters?

Checked out this question - what types of filters are there, and what are their uses - but even that talks of the same two scenarios.

Answer

There are dozens if not hundreds of websites describing usage of ND filters. Lots of them giving many interesting examples far beyond what you described.

Basically:

• Waterscapes where you want to have blurred water, or perfectly flat water surface



• Pictures with flowing water where you want to get more "photographic" looks of it


• Landscapes and cityscapes where you want to remove people and cars from photographs (they'll blur away)


• Night photography where you want to achieve blurred stars showing a motion of the earth


• Cityscapes where you want to show traffic (lines of lights from cars on the roads)


• Architecture with dramatic sky effect (blurred clouds, require ~15-30sec exposure)


• Artificial fog without smoke machine


• Achieving shallow or deep depth of field (depending on light)


• Lightpainting

Here you got some more examples: