Learn to optimize the camera for a night portrait you can do one of two things. First, it is very easy to change the mode dial to the scene mode. Let us turn the mode dial to SCN this stands for scene, and this allows you to choose the scene what you’re taking a picture of from about 24 different possible scenes.

Night portrait is one of those possibilities, so we’ll just press set to accept and immediately I have noticed that you have to use the flash with night portrait photography so it will tells you to open the flash. So we will do that here. Now, it’s also telling me that the slow synchro is going to be used and I can’t do anything about that. That is actually fine, because that is what you want. You want the flash to be used, but the shutter speed to be open long enough to expose from the ambient light.

If you press the quick menu button, hold it down for just a second, you can see that I do not have access to many functions, both my ISO and white balance will be set automatically for me, and if I move over to the right, the default auto-focus mode is face detection. If the scene is too dark and the camera may not be able to detect the face and there for not know where to focus, so usually I like to change this to the single area focus, right here. And go out and press the button to escape this menu.

Now, I have my focusing brackets in the center and I can place them over my subject, press the shutter button halfway to lock focus, then recompose the image and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take a picture. If this were a low light situation, my shutter speed would probably be 1/8th of a second which is the minimum of a longest shutter speed this mode can produce which is fine, I probably do not want any longer that that because I am assuming we do not have tripod with us, and there is a person in the shot so they may move as well. However, if you are using a tripod and you want to experiment with shutter speed a little bit longer than 1/8th of a second, then what you can do is very simply. Move your mode dial to the aperture priority mode, in the back set an appropriate aperture for portraits. I use the quick menu toggle to move that down opening up the aperture just a little bit to F3.2.

Now it is nice and wide getting me that shutter depth of field so only my person or subject will be on focus while the background is blurred out. My ISO is currently set to 80 and mainly to increase this, it really depends on the amount of light and how long I want that shutter speed to be. My white balance is currently set to daylight, I am going to change that. Go ahead and press the quick menu button, hold that down for a second to access the menu, move over to the white balance. You probably want to set this to flash. The reason why you want to use the flash white balance is because you’re using the flash to illuminate the subject. So you want to correct for that and have the subject properly white balance as opposed to choosing halogen which will have the background city lights properly white balance.

If you move over to ISO, right now I am going to leave this on 80 and we may need to increase the ISO later on, if we test and see that our shutter speed is much too slow. But, I press the quick menu to escape for now, and my flash is currently set to slow synchro and this is great. If yours is not, just go ahead and press the flash button right here, the right navigation button and use the up or down navigation buttons to choose slow synchro and then press set. Again, what this would do is pop the flash to illuminate the subject in the foreground but leave a long shutter speed for the background lights. So now it is basically like any other picture, just place your focusing brackets over the subject, press the shutter button halfway and recompose before your take a picture.

Now look down here you can see that right now, my shutter speed is 1/400 of a second and that’s because I have lot of light in my scene, but in your case this is a full second and you need this to be higher, you’re going to need to increase the ISO. So release the shutter button, go back in to the quick menu, go down to increase the ISO and then exit the quick menu, and now we can press the shutter button halfway and you can see that the shutter speed is much faster. Once you are focused on your target, recompose the image, you can go ahead and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

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