For taking pictures of people in front of landscapes it’s very simple setting up the camera. You don’t have a scene for it in the scene mode because normally the cameras don’t support this even though it’s a picture that seems to be taken most frequently. People always want to have their picture taken in front of a glorious landscape. So what you’d want to do is set aperture priority mode so you can set an appropriate aperture to get every thing in focus.

The only difference between these and a regular landscape is here you’re going to be using the flash to illuminate the subject. So with the Aperture Priority mode, you can set your aperture to something small like F7.1 or even F8. Now I know that my aperture is very nice and small and I’ll get everything in focus. But I still want my subject, the person to be in sharp focus. We have plenty of light because we’re outdoors so you can keep the ISO set to 80. Press the quick menu button. Hold that down for just a second. The wide balance however, I would not recommend to sticking to auto wide balance. You can improve the color by choosing daylight. If it is cloudy or if you’re in a shade, go to one of these two options, it will help warm up the tones a little. You can see that effect in the picture right now. I choose daylight, the picture is much cooler. And if you go over to ISO, make sure that you’re on ISO 80. So move the joystick down or up to select 80 and now you can escape this menu.

Now you do want to use the flash to illuminate so go ahead and pop that. Now you don’t want to use auto flash because the camera seized enough light in the scene so it will choose not to use a flash. So press the flash button right here to the right and go down to force flash on and press set and now the flash is going to fire no matter what. Now you want to adjust the strength of the flash. Keep in mind when you’re adjusting the strength of the flash, the distance of the person from the camera. If the person is closer than about 10 feet or 3 meters and you’ll probably want to decrease the power of the flash. If the person is more than 10 feet or 3 meters and you want to increase the power of the flash. To do so it’s very simple, just press the up navigation or exposure compensation button right here. Press that 3 times and so you get to the flash exposure value. You can either use the right or left navigation buttons or the quick menu joystick to move the value down or up.

I’m assuming the person is farther away than 10 feet because we want to capture the whole person and the background. So I’m going to turn this all the way up to plus 2, press set. Now you can just focus on the subject, press the shutter button halfway to lock focus. Recompose the image and then press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture. Remember for a little bit better composition, you don’t want to have your subject right in the center of the image and certainly not their head right in the center of the picture. So even though you’re focusing on their head, with the shutter button press halfway, tilt the camera down and move it a little bit over so they’re not perfectly centered and then take the picture.

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