With night portrait pictures, the idea is to use the flash in order to brighten your subject, the person in the picture, but leaves the shutter open long enough to also properly expose for the background light.

So the way to do this, you can do this a couple different ways with the camera one way very simple. Turn your mode dial to SCN which is the scene mode, and this will allow you to profile the camera or night portraits. You can use your dial here to change the mode, and here’s night scene, and this is exactly what I want. You have two options, night scene, and night snap shot. I would recommend going with night scene if you have a tripod, but if you don’t have, a tripod and you need to hand hold the picture, to have and use night snap shot. That would be this one right here. Night snap shot is going to try and get you a faster shutter speed by increasing the ISO but it still may not be fast enough to hand hold so I would highly recommend using a tripod in this situations.

I'm going to turn mine to night scene, and as you can see currently, my flash is turned to auto in this case because we are at night and it’s now tourist more than like with a flash will be used. But I could guarantee that I would recommend setting this to the flash on mode by pressing the flash button here and move over to flash on. Go ahead and press set, the ISO is set to automatic, there’s no way of changing this. The wide bounce is also set to automatic, and these two can’t be changed which may or may not cause problems, the flash may turn out okay but the civilized in the background will have to turn out yellow. And there’s not the whole that you can really do about that even if you had control over the wide balance because the flash is very blue lights and the city lights are very, very yellowish the more it comes to this lights.

In this case, what you’ll do now is just go ahead and press the shutter button halfway lock he focus on your subject. If you can’t lock focus because there is very, very little light even though you have the auto focus it seems to be activated and everything should work out fine, this still may be able to lock focus. You may want to use the manual focus. I’ll show you how to do that in a second.

Press the shutter button halfway. Once the focusing square has turned green, the focus has been locked and you can go ahead and re compose the image anyway you want and press the shutter the button the rest of the way to take the picture.

If you can’t find the focus point because again, it is very, very low light, I would recommend you using the manual focus. Press the MF button right here that’s just the manual focus. Go ahead and use your dial to move this to approximately what you feel the distance is between the camera and the subject, so in this case. I’m going to go ahead and set this to about two meters. I'm going to place myself roughly two meters from the subject in order to have that focus would be as accurate as possible. Once that sets, press the shutter button halfway, we compose the image, and go ahead and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

You can see it in my ayase as set to 80, and my flash is Orthion, which is exactly what I want. Because this mode automates a lot of the cameras features such as ISO and Wide Balance, I prefer not using this mode. Instead of using this mode, what I would recommend doing is turn your mode dial that two feet. The program is in equated with the P, and this is what we normally use, so you really don’t need to go into the scene mode and hunt around for the proper scene, you just leave it on P.

Our ISO is set to 80, let’s push your compensation is up to zero, and the back I want to force the flash so press the flash button right here to access a flash setting, and then use the dial to move around until I get to flash on. Press set and so again let’s set to 80, my wide balance is set to tungsten and this is great for the city lights in the background, but not so great for the subject, so I’m going to want to change this. Press the short cut button or the function button to access ISO, and I'm going to trim this to flash because I am using the flash and I don’t want my subject to come on very blue.

Had I stayed on tungsten, the city lights in the background would come out great, by my subject would probably come out a little bit blue because the flash is a very blue light, so press set to accept that. The other thing with the flash again because I am relatively close to my subjects and this is really dependent on how close you are to your subject. You may want to decrease the flash exposure compensation. You’ll do that by pressing the function button, go down to flash exposure compensation right here. Purely minus set to minus two and that maybe a little bit too low, so turn that up to minus one, minus 2/3, minus 1/3.

I would say that minus one is pretty good but you mean it to test this. Again, this really depends on how far away you are from the subject. So if yo don’t want the flash to be totally over powering, you still want the person to come out very naturally looking so use the slightly weaker flash button press set.

Now, the last thing is, when you’re using the flash, sometimes the shutter speed will be consistently once sets you to a second that is because the camera things that there is enough light, and wants you to be able to hand hold of that picture. So in order to make sure that we also exposed for the background light, what you want to do, I’ll portly access the flash settings by pressing the flash button, and the pressing menu, and here, I can change my slow synchro setting.

My slow synchro setting allows the camera to set a slower shutter speed while still using the flash so I want this to be on. Like in your case, it’s turned off. Go ahead and turn that on, and then press the menu then escape. Go ahead and press the shutter button halfway to see what the shutter speed is set to. If the shutter speed is much less that 16o of a second, you may want to increase your ISO in order to increase the shutter speed. Because we are taking the picture of the person, you can expect the person to be still for a full second exposure, so you want this to be something reasonable.

If you are nearing a full second exposure, go ahead and turn the ISO dial, increasing the ayase, press the shutter button halfway again, and as you can see now I'm at 1500 for the second. You won’t be quite that high but as long as it is nearing one eight of a second, you want thirty for the second, you should be okay.

To find out much more about Digital Photography, and your Digital Camera, go to LBGuides.com.