Manual camera settings for outdoor portraits

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Taking great outdoor portraits begins by learning how to get your camera settings right. ISO is the measurement of a camera sensors sensitivity to light. How this translates into your images is that it is a way to artificially introduce light into an exposure where little light or none is available.

Normally, you will want to take photos at a low ISO — between and if you can help it. On most cameras, these settings will produce the most clear and grain-free results. When you are shooting later in the day or indoor where there is low light, it will become necessary to increase your ISO in order to get a well exposed image where you can actually see what is going on.

By integrating flash into your photography , you can work around this to an extent. The downside of increasing your ISO is that it will add grain into your picture.

Control over ISO is one of the biggest flaws with beginner camera models as they often produce results that are unusable at fairly low ISO figures. How does it apply to outdoor portrait photography? The overall image is impacted by the ISO. We consider aperture to be the most important individual camera setting as it relates to portrait photography.

On a technical level, the aperture of your camera lets light in to the camera setting. It also determines how far or close background objects look relative to the subject you are focusing on — referred to as depth of field.

A narrow DOF means that a small portion of the image will be in focus such as the portrait subject , while the background will be blurred out. A large DOF means that more of the image will be in focus — including the subject and the background.

Your choice of aperture will define your photo in many ways. Often, we shoot at wide open apertures in our portrait photography to blur out the background creating the bokeh effect. Shutter speed relates to how quickly the camera shutter closes and opens back up. The most important component of shutter speed is understanding how it relates to movement. For outdoor portraits, you will normally be able to set a relatively low shutter speed around since your subject will be standing still.

One side effect of bringing up your shutter speed is that it will darken the exposure. This means if you are photographing someone running, you may need to bring the shutter speed higher say: , but compensate with ISO in order to keep the photo well exposed. For most portraits, you can use a relatively low shutter speed we put ours around — when people are standing still.

There is not often a lot of movement in portraits — with the exception given for walking shots if you are trying to add some motion into your images. The white balance setting is not often given the same level of importance as the above 3 camera functions, but it is extremely important.

White balance determines to overall color of an image. It is better for your photography to learn how to set this on your own.

Some cameras allow you to actually select the Kelvin temperature of a shot this is most common on higher level equipment , while virtually all cameras allow you to select based on some presets like cloudy, sunny, etc. White balance impacts your portrait photography most heavily in the area of skin tones. For most photographers, you will want an image temperature that offers a natural and flattering skin tone.

Yes, some color corrections can be made through post processing, but getting things right in camera will help speed this process up.