In order to set up your camera for a night portrait, what you’re going to want to do is probably use the night portrait mode. Let's understand that with a night portrait, the idea is to use the flash in order to illuminate the subject while maintaining a longer shutter speed to expose for the ambient light as well, and this is exactly what the night portrait does very well.

So, go ahead and turn your mode dial to this mode. This is the night portrait mode. Turn the camera on and let's go ahead and walk through the functions, the function menu. First, go ahead and press the function button here. Now, at the top, my ISO is set to auto, that’s fine. That’s forced. I can't even change that. My white balance is currently set to auto white balance, which I never like to use so change that. If you’re using the flash and the subject is pretty close, where it's mostly being lit by the flash, which is probably most situations with this scenario. Then what you want to do is use daylight actually, even though the streetlights maybe tungsten and this is because if you used tungsten and you use the flash, your subject will turn out very blue. So go ahead and use daylight. This is the closest to your flash color temperature. So, daylight it is.

Let's go down t drive mode. Single shut is fine. Effect has turned off, that’s great. Now, flash compensation, again, this depends how far away do your subject is from the camera. You may need to adjust this. First, I would give it a shot at zero. If you feel like the flash is not [powerful enough because they are too far away then go ahead increase that. If you feel like it is to strong and you don’t want it to be so over powering then you can decrease the flash output and then I’ll give them a little bit more lighten up too much. So that’s how you deal with that.

I’m just going to press the function button again to escape the function menu and you’ll notice up here, my flash is set to automatic which I don’t like because I don’t want to question whether the camera will use the camera or not.

Again, with this scenario, I need to use the flash. I want to use the flash because I want to illuminate my subject so press the up navigation button or the flash button to adjust the flash to forcing the flash, which is the lighting mode. Once you have all this thing set up, your ready to take the picture and just like with any picture, do ahead and press the shutter button halfway to find the focus point on your subject and then you can hold that button halfway, recompose the image. So the subject is not necessarily right in the center of the frame and then just press the shutter button the rest of the way.