How to take night portraits

Night portraits are a difficult photo to master, at some point in time you are likely to try taking a night photo with a cool background and someone in front of it. Without proper exposure settings and a flash, your photo will likely lack the appearance you desired.

Many people know to take a shot at night will require a flash to properly light a subject and not have subject or camera movement blur.

Here I show an example of the typical “night photo” its a shot of an individual inside a night life establishment. The settings are as follows: Exposure: 0.05 sec (1/20), Aperture: f/2.8, Focal Length: 24 mm, ISO Speed: 3200. As you can clearly see, the background is severely under exposed, and so we are not able to clearly figure out what environment the subject is being photographed in.

Under exposed background

We can somewhat make out the background, but obviously the photo is underwhelming and does not show any significant background environment. By implementing the techinque referred to as “dragging the shutter” we can now expose for a longer ambient and background exposure. Shooting in manual mode, I now adjust my shutter speed from .05 of a second to .4 of a second. Now we are letting in a lot more background ambient light, but we are still using our flash to sufficiently light our subject. We also use “2nd curtain” flash option on our flash. We use this because it fires the flash at the end of the shot, immediately prior to the shutter closing. When the flash fires, the subject is frozen and properly exposed.

Under exposed background

By using manual mode, you can sufficiently meter for the background of your image. You can then use a flash to expose your subject properly and get detailed and well lit background shots while also freezing subject movement.