So, you’ve been asked to take portraits — congratulations! Grab your Nikon D70 and SB-600 Speedlight and follow along:

1. Expose for the background

To begin with, put your camera in Manual mode. Pick a shutter speed, aperture, and ISO level that exposes the background the way you want it to look in the shot. Keep in mind that your shutter speed needs to be at or slower than the flash sync speed (1/500), so lower your ISO or tighten your aperture if it’s too high.

If your background is an outdoor scene, it’s likely that you’ll want it to be underexposed compared to your subject. Take a few shots (without flash!) until you’re happy with the exposure.

What’s your white balance set to? Be sure it’s appropriate for the light you’re in; white objects should look white, and grey should look grey with no color cast.

2. Plug in your flash

Connect your flash and turn it on. If you have a flash bracket, now’s a good time to use it; if not, you need one! Taking photos when the camera is in portrait orientation without a flash bracket is an exercise in funny-looking shadows.

If you didn’t put the camera in Manual mode, push the Mode button on the back of the flash until the display says “TTL”, not “TTL BL”, in the upper-left corner of the display. (This tells the camera that the flash will be used to light the subject of the photo, not provide backlighting.)

If you set a white balance other than Cloudy, Sunlight, or Flash in the step above, you’ll need to gel your flash to match. Nikon’s SJ-1 color filter set is designed to do exactly this. If you skip this step, your subject will be in different colored light than your background, which means a real headache later!

3. Light your subject

Push the flash button on the left of the pop-up flash on your D70 and turn the front command wheel to set the flash compensation to -1.0. Take a test shot, then look at the histogram and at the display — is your subject too bright? Too dim? Adjust the flash compensation and take test shots until you’ve found the right balance. Remember: adjust your aperture and shutter speed to change the background exposure, and the flash compensation to change the subject exposure.

Voila! You’ve now got a perfect portrait.

Once you’ve got that down, head on over to Neil van Niekerk’s site to learn all about bounce flash.