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Sunny 16
- Thread starter will351
- Start date
Sunny 16 is a way to have a rough idea of correct exposure without a meter. So at f/16, 1/100s iso 100 is a correct exposure, adjust any of the settings as you like but make sure to adjust the others to keep the equivalent exposure.
But your camera has a meter, and can tell what the correct exposure is for the specific lighting you have, and doesn't have to rely on this rule of thumb. If you set Av, the camera will adjust hte shutter speed to correctly expose for the light.
But your camera has a meter, and can tell what the correct exposure is for the specific lighting you have, and doesn't have to rely on this rule of thumb. If you set Av, the camera will adjust hte shutter speed to correctly expose for the light.
Sunny 16 is more about accuracy. Some scenes can fool the meters of even modern cameras into setting exposure too high or too low.
Still, outside of using an incident light meter, the most accurate way to set exposure is to use your camera, guided by an understanding of how exposure works.
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Still, outside of using an incident light meter, the most accurate way to set exposure is to use your camera, guided by an understanding of how exposure works.
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Deleted1929
Forum Pro
It's not a case of it being more accurate, it's a case of it being done by the user and not hoping the machine does it the way you want.
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StephenG
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StephenG
It is about being more accurate. Even in P mode you can get the camera to do exactly what you want it to do. If you don't understand exposure, you'll still be at the mercy of the camera's decisions, even in manual mode.
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Barrie Davis
Forum Pro
Sixteen is just the aperture that is correct when Clear Sun shines on your subject, and Shutter Speed is set to reciprocal of ISO value. Any combination of shutter-speed/aperture could be used, instead, as long as it is an equivalent exposure... (passes an equal quantity of light.)
Other lighting conditions use different apertures, of course..
- Clear Sun = f/16 (or any convenient exposure combination that is equivalent)
- Hazy Sun === f/11
- Cloudy Bright = f/8
- Cloudy Dull == f/5.6
- Open Shade = f/5.6
- Clear Sun on sand or snow = f/22
These days, with cameras so much smaller, we tend to shy away from actual f/16 or f/22 values because of diffraction problems... but f/16 was fine back when everyone shot rollfilm.
Final note: The Sunny 16 rule is amazingly accurate in practise. .. so good you can use it to check a meter that's maybe faulty.
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Regards,
Baz
"Ahh... But the thing is, they were not just ORDINARY time travellers!"
Barrie Davis
Forum Pro
Ooooh... yeth!
(God, I love it when you are domineering!) ;-)
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Regards,
Baz
"Ahh... But the thing is, they were not just ORDINARY time travellers!"
Cedarhill
Senior Member
I think Graystar must be joking. I used sunny 16 in the 1960's when I shot TLR cameras that didn't have an internal light meter. As soon as I got a light meter or a camera that had one internally, I never used the rule again. There is no accuracy advantage to using a rule of thumb instead of a calibrated instrument to gauge light levels.
cnwphotocom
Well-known member
Sunny 16 works just as well in AP, but you'll need to overexpose a few stops if you don't want the foreground elements to be dark or silhouettes. Here's an article all about shooting into the sun:
http://actionphotoschool.com/shooting-into-the-sun/
http://actionphotoschool.com/shooting-into-the-sun/
The Sage Knows
Senior Member
Unless it is a clear and sunny day, with the sun at your back and your field of view is made up of a predominately dark green forest or a snowfield. Then the instrument that was calibrated to accurately tell you the exposure for a midtone will lead you to overexposure or underexposure respectively.
You could say that a good photographer would know this and compensate accordingly. But then you would use some “rule of thumb” based on your experience to revise the measurement with the Exp Comp dial of your “calibrated instrument” right?
The Sunny 16 rule will always produce a consistent exposure under the above conditions. I actually prefer my own personal rule of Sunny 14 and put my camera on manual. Then I don’t need to readjust exp. compensation depending whether I aim low to get more of a forest, or aim higher to get more of the light snowy mountain. Or if a hiker with a highly reflective jacket becomes the subject.
Take a close look a series of shots under the same sun at your back situation taken of different reflectances based solely on a meter's recommendation and without any compensation applied shot to shot. The EXIF data would show various exposures. The ones closest to Sunny 16 would be correct.
Now outside of this one limited circumstance, overcast conditions for example, one would be better served using the meter as a starting point. But the old Sunny 16 rule shouldn't be retired yet.
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Robert
Barrie Davis
Forum Pro
The rule is based on actual light levels measured and accumulated over a time period going back before the turn of the 20th-Century. It is because those light levels have shown themselves to be remarkably stable across the world...... that the rule works as well as it does.
--(With the restriction that exposures should be made between 2 hours after sunrise, up to 2 hours before sunset. Different light tables apply in times closer to sun-up/sun-down.)--
Indeed, it should be no surprise that the rule holds good. Sunny 16 is an Incident Light Method, and, like incident readings generally, is somewhat more reliable and needing of less compensation than the reflected light reading that comes from a dSLR's meter.
So there you go! Don't thank me. I like spreading good news.
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Regards,
Baz
"Ahh... But the thing is, they were not just ORDINARY time travellers!"
Only within certain ranges of latitude, and you've also left out the part about being sure to bracket your exposures. The article everybody likes to cite seems to claim there's no difference between the intensity of light at noon at the equator and just this side of the arctic circle, but that's nonsense.
Barrie Davis
Forum Pro
All temperate zones are included in the rule, with tables for the other zones if you want them, like the "within 2 hours of sunrise/sunset" tables.
Bracketing was originally suggested to cover mechanical errors in shutter speeds as much as anything else. With electronic timing to the microsecond, and more robust shutter mechanisms, it is a whole lot less necessary, now.
But hey! Please don't let me stop you from bracketing. It's always a good idea if circumstances permit. Besides, you can use bracketing to cover any discrepancies for latitudes other than temperate ones....
... and digital bracketing is a lot less costly than doing it with film, isn't it?
Hmmm... don't know which article that might be...[??]
Thing is, it's a great deal less difference than intuition suggests it should be. The other thing being that it's so stable, meaning, once you know what your local sunshine levels are, in tomorrow's sunshine they will definitely be the same. In this regard the exposure consistency resulting is much better than that obtained between one shot and the next when metering by reflected light, or relying on something like Nikon CLS...[!!!]
In the final analysis the Sunny 16 rule, and its extensions covering cloudier conditions, remains an Incident Light Method of exposure detirmination...
.... and its complete independence from the camera meter is what makes it worth knowing about.
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Regards,
Baz
"Ahh... But the thing is, they were not just ORDINARY time travellers!"
Cedarhill
Senior Member
Sunny 16 is reliable under a very narrow set of circumstances. If you shoot on overcast days or in shade or late in the day, you have to start guessing how much to change the exposure. Although I was pretty good at it 35 yeas ago, I do a lot better today with a light meter. Saying sunny 16 is useful is like saying a Kodak Brownie that shoots at one aperture and one shutter speed is useful. I suppose it comes down to what you call useful. I certainly wouldn't want to use a Brownie again.
For sure. Automatic, too. I can't understand why its use isn't more common, especially among those who agonize at length about the minutiae of exposure.But hey! Please don't let me stop you from bracketing. It's always a good idea if circumstances permit. Besides, you can use bracketing to cover any discrepancies for latitudes other than temperate ones....
... and digital bracketing is a lot less costly than doing it with film, isn't it?
On the other hand, a film like Portra 400 can be exposed successfully at ISO ratings ranging from 25 up to 1600, so it's easy for a guess to be in the ball park. Digital doesn't have latitude like that.
http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm
From December 1969 to January 1970 I went from Darmstadt Germany to Qui Nhon Vietnam. Darmstadt's up near the Arctic Circle, Vietnam is very close to the equator. It was so shockingly bright in Vietnam I had to send home for darker sunglasses. When I eventually returned home to New York, I found those sunglasses to be so dark I couldn't see anything with them even at high noon.
Now that, I do agree with.
If for no other reason than as a sanity check on the meter, sure.
Barrie Davis
Forum Pro
Every method of exposure determination has its limitations, and I already pointed out that an extra factor has to be applied when the sun is 2 hours from the horizon... ..
... but, no. You don't have to guess the "cloudy" light levels, at all. In fact, for the most part they are notably clear to the eye, once you know the trick of it..
- Bright Sun [f/16] ... Sharp-edged shadows.
- Hazy sun [f/11] ...Light veiling of cloud over the sun.. gives soft-edged shadows....(If the hand is outstretched the fingers are not delineated in the shadow, but the arm remains visible.)
- Cloudy Bright [f/8] ... All body shadows disappear. (Position of sun in sky cannot be discerned behind cloud cover.)
- Cloudy Dull [f/5.6] ... Same as Cloudy Bright, but darker. Rain appears immanent, or is actually falling. (Most people take off their sunglasses at the transition from Cloudy Bright to Cloudy Dull, and this is a good indicator.)
Some people forget this. I hope that you were not one of them. ;-)
Well, that's you.
It happens that I still have my Daddy's Brownie Hawkeye from 1932, and, until the 90s, I enjoyed using it to show a class of students the quality of pictures it produces when used in the Sunny 16 conditions it is specifically set up for...my point in the exercise being to put their attitudes to metering into perspective.
Indeed, just like I'd been formally taught in college, I used to start the photo course exposure instruction with "How to use the exposure recommendations printed on the inside of the film box...."
.... which most people will realise is an ideographic representation of a fuller set of the Sunny 16 rules indicated above.
Moreover, I would take students out from the classroom to directly compare the shutter speeds and apertures arrived at using those recommendations, with those they were getting from metering with all their different cameras and different levels of metering know how...
.... (much as another poster to this thread has advocated doing as an exercise.)
What I didn't have was an SEI spot Photometer, which I'd been taught to use... (bit pricey, bit hard to find)
After the above rules were learned, and the fact appreciated that they were Incident Readings , the students were far better able to understand why their reflected readings had NOT worked so reliably, and why they wouldn't ever do so...
.... at least, until such time as they gained the experience to COMPENSATE reflected light readings accurately for different subject tone distributions....
.... which, it may be argued, is just as much mental effort as simply keeping your eye in with Sunny 16... (shrugs)
So back off with the "metering is more accurate" line, if you please, because it simply isn't true for the vast majority of outdoor shooting...
.... although I am happy to admit it's an entirely different case with the INDOOR use of a meter, if properly handled, because indoor lighting is a so much more variable than outdoors.
Note 1: This is not to say that I dispense with a meter for outdoor shooting.... but I know I CAN, anytime I want to, and to make a point if I need to. What's more, given your experience, I don't suppose you would have trouble, either.
Estimating Incident Light Levels ... You can get good at it, just by being familiar with your particular incident meter..
Note 2: To this end the boss I once worked for asked if I could obtain for him the calculator dial of a Weston Master model V exposure meter. This is a pair of engraved metal disks much after the form of a little circular slide rule... if anybody remembers those.
What he did NOT want was the rest of the meter, JUST the calculator with the shutter speeds and apertures on it to slip in his pocket and stay with him.
As he said at the time...
"It's no trouble estimating light levels. I can tell which scale point a scene will swing on a Weston simply by looking... we can all do it within 1/3 stop with a little practise. The time-consuming part of working without a meter is back-tracking from the Sunny 16 rule to get to the actual shutter speeds and apertures for the ASAs in use... If I had the dial for calculating the exposures it would suffice for the whole darned meter."
He was right, too. Didn't get that dial for him, though. Can't remember why. Some problem or another... [?]
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Regards,
Baz
"Ahh... But the thing is, they were not just ORDINARY time travellers!"
OK so I understand from DPR forums and wikipedia that sunny16 is such that you set your aperture to f16 with shutter speed being the reciprocal of the ISO setting.
exs f16 iso100 ss1/100 or f16 iso200 ss1/200 etc etc
Without memorizing a charge of values, is there any rule of thumb if you want to start using shutter speeds and ISO values that are not reciprocals? Is this just not done?
exs f16 iso100 ss1/100 or f16 iso200 ss1/200 etc etc
Without memorizing a charge of values, is there any rule of thumb if you want to start using shutter speeds and ISO values that are not reciprocals? Is this just not done?
The Sage Knows
Senior Member
If you mean, how would you shoot at 1/500s at ISO 100 on a clear sunny day while basing the exposure on the Sunny 16 rule, then "without memorizing a chart of values", you just count the clicks from 1/100s to 1/500s as you turn the shutter dial on your camera (seven 1/3 stop clicks). The you click as many time going the other way with the aperture dial from f/16....seven 1/3 stop clicks ....f/7.1.
1/500 f/7.1 at ISO 100
Manual Mode
I prefer a 1/3 to 2/3 stop lighter exposure myself if there is more shade in the picture or if the sun isn't squarely behind me.
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Robert
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