Taking Portraits Like a Professional Under Low Light Conditions

Flash is an essential tool when taking portraits under low light conditions or at night. Without flash, the shutter speed will get too long to effectively freeze the subjects, thus producing blurry or dull images.

I am sure you will frequently notice that when using flash for portraits at night, the background gets very dark and thus producing very unattractive photographs. Viewers will have difficulties figuring where the photographs are taken due to the dark background.

The main reason is because when you pop-up the flash, the shutter speed of the camera gets too fast to capture the lights emitted from the background. As such, the background will not be recorded by the sensor of the camera and therefore appears to be dark with not many details.

There is an easy way to overcome this situation where the subjects and background are beautifully captured in portrait shoots.

Set your camera to Manual mode with aperture between F5 to F9 and shutter speed at 1/30 seconds. As flash is being used, you do not need a high ISO rating. An ISO of 400 will do the trick. Focus on your subjects and starts shooting to produce results like a professional!

With shutter speed of 1/30 seconds, the light from the background will most likely be recorded by the camera sensor. Blurry images caused by camera shake due to long shutter speed are not an issue here as the flash will freeze the subject, thus minimizing blurry images.

Alternatively, you can simply set the flash option to “Slow Sync Flash” which can also produce similar results.

Now that you have learnt the technique to shoot portraits like a professional at night, grab and camera and start shooting now!

Yong Sak is a Singapore Photographer who enjoys taking photographs and sharing his knowledge in photography to those who are also keen in this hobby. He shares many Basic Photography Fundamentals which are useful to beginners. He owns a Photography Portal which houses many Photography Tips, which are essentials for those who are new to photography and are hungry for more information.