Saturday night I was messing around with some settings, trying to get a blur effect that I have seen several photographers use. The first photo I've attached is sort of the goal of what I'd like to achieve. The 2nd photo is the best of my obviously awful attempts to capture that effect.

Can anyone give me any hints on what settings I might need to get this effect?

Thanks for any advice!

There is only one file attached. But to get the blurr you simply slow the shutter down. Depending on how much blur you want you may have to adjust aperature and ISO to get the correct exposure you want.

If using flash you can use second curtain flash mode to give some blur as well.

Ok, second attachemnt appeared after I posted this..lol
JS

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Ok, second attachemnt appeared after I posted this..lol
JS

Whew...I was trying to figure out why only one was showing as I was seeing two...

I turned the flash off and tried 7 different shutter speeds but I just couldn't seem to catch it right.

Try with 2nd curtain flash then, it should work fine.

JS

You can work out the exposure, but it's doing it the hard way :(
I don't know how big the cars are, but in that first picture if you have it at higher resolutin take a look at how long a streak of light is on a highlight.
If you know how fast the cars are driving as they pass the flag, and how long that streak is in real life, then you can work out how long the shutter was open for.

For example 60 miles per hour is 26 metres per second, so a car doing 60mph at about 1/100 second would be a 0.26 metre blur at that speed.

Your second image the shutter speed is so slow that you can't see the cars !
Looking very carefully I can see some light bands that might be reflection from a flashing light like a fluorescent bulb. I can see 22 of them across the frame which would be about 1/6 second.