With Portrait pictures, the idea is to have just a subject in focus with everything in front of or behind the subject out of focus.

So the way you can do this, the camera gives you a couple of options. One is very animated; you can turn the mode dial right here to the SCN mode, from that to SCN which stands for scene. And in here, you can choose portraits as your scene profile.

Right now, my scene profile is at the portrait but if yours is not, you just use this dial to move that around until you get to the portrait theme profile.

In the portrait scene profile, my ISO is set to automatic, and I don’t have control over my wide balance which can be a problem. Currently, my flash is set to automatic, but you can change that if you like, and then basically everything is very much automated for me. You can see that also in my focusing square is no longer in the center. The focusing is set to face the text, and if the portrait for example the person isn’t looking straight up the camera, the camera will have a very hard time finding a focus point, and it will just focus at the center.

So instead of this, what I prefer doing is turn the mode dial to the AV mode. Here is the AV mode which stands for Aperture Value and this allows me to set the Aperture on the camera compensates by setting a proper shutter speed. This also gives me a lot more control over Ayase and wide balance which is very, very good.

Because I'm shooting a portrait, I'm going to assume that there is nothing in front of the subject as in between the subject and the camera. I'm going to assume that this is just the person, and everything else is behind the subject.

So I'm going to use the flash in order to brighten up the subject a little bit, and I’ll show you how to decrease the power of the flash, in case this subject is too close, so you don’t over expose the subject.

The ISO is probably set to 80. If you need to change that, you can just change that with the ISO dial right here 100, 200, anything you like.

Now the ISO is something that I usually set at the very end, and I’ll show you why.

First let’s go ahead and set up the wide balance. The wide balance is right over here currently is set to the daylight and I can set this by either pressing the shortcut button I previously and you’ll be getting started guide to set up me short cut button to access wide balance it’s all that such that, and using the dial. I can just move this over to the wide balance that best suites my needs. If you are indoors, you can use either tungsten or fluorescent over I'm assuming where outdoors so I'm going to go with regular daylight. Let’s set to say okay, and so we have the flash set.

Again, if your flash isn’t set up to fire, just go ahead and presses the flash button right here and choose. If it’s on off, choose on, and set that to flash. Rate and press set or give it a second to go away. Now the flash is going to fire and so I turn this out to 80. My wide balance is properly set and down here, because we are in the AV mode, I have accessed to my Aperture Value, so I can use this dial, to change the setting with just about anything I want between F8, which will get me everything in focus wait for landscapes, and F2. Eight, which will be a very, very shallow depth of field, not maybe a little bit too shallow in my case because I want the persons’ entire head to be in focus, and not just the eyes or the nose for example I want the ears as well. Some is going to turn this up a little bit to 3.5. Now it’ll give me a little bit deeper depth of field for a portrait.

So now, that my flash is set, my wide balance is set, and my Aperture is set correctly, I want to test and make sure that my Ayase is set correctly, so go ahead and press the shutter button halfway. You don’t have to worry about focusing; I just want to get the meter to indicate what the shutter speed is going to be. So right now, you can see down here my shutter speed is turning set to one-58 of a second, and that’s because I have a whole bunch of light. So I certainly don’t need any more that 80.

However, in your case if you are on a low light situation, you may want to consider increase in the ISO, if that shutter speed value drops below 160 of a second. Below that, it’ll be a little bit more difficult to hand hold, and so you’ll need to have the camera be a little bit more sensitive to the ambient plate, and increase the shutter speed so you can hand hold the shut. So then you would increase the ISO let’s say up to 200.

Try that again press the shutter button halfway. Now I'm at one, 500 of a second, so I know this is a great and I'm not going to need to set the ISO any higher that that. Again, in my case, I'm probably lower than that because 200 will be more grainy that 80, so if you want to lowest that, it is impossible to maintain a better image quality but to also maintain this shutter value above 160 of a second, so I’ll move my shut down to 80.

And now, we’re ready to take the picture so if you want to place the focusing square over your subject, usually I right the focus on the person’s eyes so I’ll focus on the eyes, press the shutter button halfway and now, my focusing square has turned green. I just heard the double beep which indicates that the camera has locked focus, and I can reposition the image. We composing the image with the shutter button pressed halfway and when I'm ready, I can just go ahead and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

Now, once you’ve taken the picture and you see that maybe the flash was a little bit too powerful because the subject is sitting a little too close to the camera, you can reduce the power of the flash a little bit so as to not completely wash out the subject. So in order to do that very easy press the function button right here, access the function menu and go down to flash exposure compensation right here, and you cam just use your dial and move this a little green dash in the minus area.

I can’t really say where to place it but you may want to try a couple of different settings to see which one works best. If previously, you were at zero, and that completely washed out the subject, you can turn it down to minus one 1/3 maybe even minus two and see if that helps and if this is still weak, then you can turn it up a little bit to see if that helps in. Press the set button to okay that setting and try to take a picture again.

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