 Hey everybody it's Craig back to here and in this video I'm going to give you the best camera settings for portrait photography shooting in natural light and then we'll get into shooting with flash. All right let's get started with natural light. So if you're shooting in natural light you have a lot of flexibility because you're not worried about your flash sync speed and we'll get to that in a second. So I suggest a general rule is shooting at a shutter speed double the size of your lens. So let's say if you're shooting with a 70 millimeter or an 85 or let's just make it simple if you're shooting with a 100 millimeter prime lens then your shutter speed at a minimum should be 200 although it'll be probably higher depending on your lighting situation you can shoot all the way up to 8,000 whatever works. So I suggest looking at your in-camera meter and then taking a test shot and then look at your histogram make sure it's close to the right but not blowing out and then also have a look at your highlight indicator warning make sure that's on as well and then just refer to that and then if you need to make it a little brighter you can. Now I don't use spot metering it depends on your camera model what they call it but I just do a general metering of the whole scene and then I just look at it and I think the best thing is to use your eyes and see what you think does it look too bright does it look too dark one thing is to always have your LCD screen on the same setting set it for three or four or five get used to how your image looks because if it's on auto it's going to vary depending on your lighting situation it's going to be really hard to tell if you look at your LCD screen and you just gauge that if it's not always set the same so set your LCD screen to about four or five whatever works for you keep it that way and then refer to your histogram and also refer to your highlight indicator warning so if you're shooting natural light as long as you're over a shutter speed of 200 you're usually pretty good now as far as your aperture it really depends on your lens if it's 2.8 general rule is three stops above that is roughly the sharpest point of the lens so if you're going for sharpness and you're using a 2.8 and you're probably going to want to shoot around f8 so anywhere from f5.6 to f11 if you're shooting portraits now if you want that blurry background then you're going to want to open it wide up you might lose some sharpness but you can use a tripod hopefully to compensate for that now i like to shoot at f14 and that's just me so it's really depending on your style now let's get to flash photography now there's two different types of strobes out there so with some strobes you have a capped sync speed so what that means is if you shoot above that you'll see a black line in your image so for example on a Canon camera with certain strobes you can only shoot at a shutter speed of 200 nothing higher than that and some Nikon cameras you can shoot at a shutter speed of 250 so be aware of that what type of strobe you're shooting with now one thing you can do to shoot at a wider aperture is to use a neutral density filter i'm going to put a link to a video below where i've shot with a neutral density filter and normally i'll shoot with a three stop so bringing the light down three stops that will allow you to shoot at a more open aperture say close to f14 f2 so that's what you would use if you're shooting outdoors and you want a wider aperture and you know that your shutter sync speed is capped at 200 or 250 so use an ND filter like i said there's a video below this one you can check that out you really can't see a visible difference if you use a high quality filter like a b plus w filter now also i have strobes that shoot at high speed sync now the difference is i can shoot up to a shutter speed of 8 000 and i don't have to use an ND filter which is just one less thing to think about and again i'm always thinking the same thing if i'm shooting with a 100 millimeter lens i times it by two and i don't want to go below 200 and it's just the same principles apply so it's really about the artistic look that you're looking for and then really just making sure that you don't blow the highlights so that you can recover everything when you're in raw and in your post now another good idea is i don't always do this i use it for a reference it's the color checker i have one of these i also have the video color checker i'll shoot that and i'll look at the suggested white balance but often for my taste i find it a little too warm for example if i'm shooting with my strobes i set my white balance to manual to 5500 and then often i'll cool it down to maybe 52 or 53 although the color checker here might say that i should be at 6000 or i should be at 7000 so always having an accurate white balance really doesn't matter as much if you're not shooting for a catalog and fashion and they want their colors to be totally accurate if you're just going for your own look and skin tones i often adjust those by eye so hopefully these tips are helpful if you have any questions if something i said wasn't clear just post them in the comment section below if you found these tips helpful give me a thumbs up also if you feel like you want to share this video just look below you can click on share and share it with other photographers and if you're not already a subscriber and you're new here my name is Craig Bechda and i come out with new videos every week so if you're into photography just click on subscribe and hit that bell notification and you'll get email updates when i release my weekly videos alright thanks for watching this video give me a thumbs up leave a comment below and i'll see you in the next video