How to take portrait at night with nikon d90?
I usually used night mode when i'm taking a portrait. I'm using a tripod as well but sometimes there's blurry and the face is not sharp… Can you suggest me what other tips to make it better…
1) Set your ISO to at least 800. Any higher you'll get noise that'll be hard to edit around, any lower your photo will turn out too dark
2) Use a slower shutter speed. Make sure you use your tripod! Camera shake is the death of all good photos!
3) Set your aperture to a low f stop to let more light in.
Pictures come blurry when any one (or in combination) of the following occurs:
1.shake of the camera
2.poor focus
3.low light
4.movement of subject
Hence, even if you put your camera onto a tripod, focus manually, hike up ISO, use slow shutter, you still don't have control over the subject movement.
Night mode is generally not a preferred mode for taking portraits. Its good for taking photos of night scene as the custom setting for night mode includes high ISO and slow shutter.
To take better photos at night,
# use well lit place for camera to expose properly
# use a fast lens (if you are using a SLR/DSLR). Fast lenses have very wide aperture which helps to0 capture more light
# use tripod
# use speedlight/flash
Lack of light is the photographers biggest test, slow shutter speeds leads to camera and/or subject movement, in a town centre the artificial light will add colour casts, images will be noisier even at low ISO, the dark lighting will force your camera ever closer to the ever present noise threshold. The only way to get noise free images is to increase the light for the shot, that's the bottom line.
The easy way to get rid of all these problems in one go is to use flash, preferably off camera flash, so you get some detail enhancing shadows in there, but even your pop up flash will work, it will isolate your subject from the darker background, the duration of the flash is faster than any shutter speed your camera can manage so no blur even if you use a slow shutter speed to record the dim ambient light, the ISO can be kept low and you'll get a noise free image, and the colour will be pure white light, so no colour casts. This is the technique I've used commercially for years, literally setting up a small studio outdoors, it works well, I even use this technique on bright days as it makes controlling the light and the direction of the light easier, though then I sometimes use reflectors.
Another way is to cheat, just turn the exposure down in post processing on an image taken in normal daylight, this is the technique used in old cowboy films from the 30's and 40's when film was slow and night scenes were always shot this way, you can see the shadows under the horses. But it can be used much more effectively these days with digital. Very few images you see in magazines are as they appear to be.
The Mode I mainly use for 90% of my images is Aperture Priority, you set the aperture for the depth of field you want, half press the shutter and the camera will tell you what shutter speed it needs to use for a correct exposure which at night will be slower than you think - simple, shutter times approaching a full 1 second are not uncommon in poorly lit streets! To be honest just increase the level of light and all the problems go away.
You can increase ISO which will give you a faster shutter speed, but at the expense of noise, even if you shoot with a long exposure at low ISO your images will still have noise in low light, all sensors generate a background noise, in low light the camera has no alternative but to be in that self generated noise zone.
Shooting in Raw and applying a noise reduction can work on portraits, all noise reduction works by blurring, but tries to maintain any edges, this can smooth out the skin on models quite effectively. I often use it as a quick way to smooth skin even when there are no noise reasons to use it.
Most importantly, Auto Focus lenses can hunt for an image in low light.