Creating movement for events

Sometimes when photographing events the client wants to show that its busy at the event, no matter how large a crowd you get sometimes its impossible to make it look big and busy and even when you get an image of a large crowd it just looks a bit empty or the expressions on the peoples faces dont look right. I find this is a good time to use longer exposures. When doing this I set up the camera on a tripod and frame up the subject in the case of the image below the subject is the cars, In terms of exposure its important to be able to distinguish that the people are there but also blur them, this can be achieved by using an exposure of about 1 second or slightly more if the people are moving slowly. The idea is not to have too long an exposure as then you just wont be able to see the people at all. Below is an example from a recent job:

Image copyright property of Nicholas Adams (www.nicholas-adams.co.uk)