In order to optimize your camera for a portrait, there are a couple of things you can do.

First thing, go ahead and move your mode dial to SCN, this will access the scene menu. In the scene menu, you have portrait. You also have soft skin if you’re interested in that and that will kind of soften up any skin tones that the camera recognizes. And I’m just going to go with portrait for now. Go ahead and press set, this mode may be good for a couple or reasons.

One, it allows me to choose my focusing point. So if you press the quick menu button, hold that down for a second to access the quick menu, move over to out of focus mode, I can choose face detection and this actually works very well. So if the person is looking at you, you can choose face detect and it’ll work right. If it’s a profile of a person and you may want to go with the one area mode because the face detect won’t recognize it. Next, the wide balance, this is very important to change, if you’re not using a flash, set the wide balance accordingly. If you’re outdoors and it’s daylight, set it daylight. If you’re indoors, go ahead and set halogen. If you are using the flash, I would recommend sticking with flash so that the person doesn’t come out looking too blue.

I’m going to go ahead and use the flash because I like how it illuminates the subject and get rid of some of the shadows so I’m going to just go ahead and press the menu button to escape and I’m going to pop the flash. Now because I’m using the flash, I want to make sure that it’s not going to overpower and blowout my subject. So it’s important to take in the consideration the distance of the subject from the camera. I’m going to assume the subject’s just pretty close because I’m really just capturing a portrait so I want to decrease the power of the flash. Go ahead and press the up navigation button or the exposure compensation button right here. Three times until you get to flash exposure volume.

You can either use the right or left navigation buttons or the quick menu joystick to move this down. I don’t want to go all the way down to minus two but may be minus one is fine for the starters and you can take a pictures and see what the result is like and change it accordingly if you need it. Go ahead and press set, now with the flash set, my wide balance is set up properly. I don’t have access to ISO in this mode but that’s really okay because the camera does a pretty good job of adjusting that automatically. So I want to make sure my brackets are over my subject. Press the shutter button halfway so the camera can lock focus. Recompose the image and then go ahead and press the shutter button the rest of the way to take the picture.

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