Sunny 16 Rule

[Shadowman]

I've read about the Sunny 16 Rule many times and was planning to use it for some fun sunny day shooting, I came across the modified rule in this wiki link, where shutter speed is modified based on the type of look the photographer might be interested in capturing. There is also a link to a "loony 11 rule" which can be used for astrophotography. And yes I'm aware that rules are really just guidelines. What lead me to this link was the fact that my image capture, a snowy day scene; had very faint shadows in some areas and there wasn't a highlight warning on the back of my camera. The image was slightly exposed to the right and I wanted to make sure I was using the correct camera settings (ISO 100, 1/250, f/16).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule

[rpcrowe]

Sunny-16 plus the exposure sheet that came with rolls of film were the way that many of us poor guys got our exposures in the days before cameras with internal exposure meters,

It works as well now as it did back then, Additionally, it is a way to tell immediately if your camera meter is really off. If you are reading 1/1,000 second at f/16 in the shade with ISO 100 - SOMETHING IS WRONG

[skitterbug]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule

I haven't been at this long enough so I will admit that I still struggle with what settings to use when I am in those camera modes that allow me to make choices. Thank you for linking to another way to look at explanations about the Sunny 16 rule.

[Shadowman]

Richard and Sandy,

When I first made the switch to digital, about 15 years ago; I wanted to learn all the features and settings of a DSLR; so the first book I read thoroughly was "The Basic Book of Photography" by Tom and Michelle Grimm. The Grimm's text was first published in 1974 and was strictly film SLR based, by the I got my copy the Grimm's were into their twelfth edition and while the text was still strictly film based; they did have a few sections on the emerging digital format cameras. One of the first things I learned was the Sunny 16 rule and it was very helpful until I started fooling around with sports, lowlight, and astrophotography. It helped me learn the basics of the camera and I just kept at it as the technology evolved. In the text there were suggested camera settings for different shooting conditions and as I broadened my choices of genre I would often fall back to the text for pointers. The last few years I've relied solely on online forums and occasionally a class here and there. After all these years I still find the medium fun yet frustrating, probably the longest amount of time I've spent on one hobby besides sketch art and computers.

[skitterbug]

Cameras are like computers in that the better the equipment, the easier/faster/more efficient I think it is. At least that is the way it works for my computer experience!

My camera is a basic one but I figure until I can understand the settings better, I may as well beat around with it for awhile more until I think I can "graduate" to something better! <grin>

Thank you for your thoughts and experiences! I like looking at your work as examples of how my pics should be!

[xpatUSA]

I've read about the Sunny 16 Rule many times and was planning to use it for some fun sunny day shooting, I came across the modified rule in this wiki link, where shutter speed is modified based on the type of look the photographer might be interested in capturing. There is also a link to a "loony 11 rule" which can be used for astrophotography. And yes I'm aware that rules are really just guidelines. What lead me to this link was the fact that my image capture, a snowy day scene; had very faint shadows in some areas and there wasn't a highlight warning on the back of my camera. The image was slightly exposed to the right and I wanted to make sure I was using the correct camera settings (ISO 100, 1/250, f/16).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunny_16_rule

Good link, John.

"loony 11" was interesting in spite of it sounding like Canadian currency.

[Shadowman]

Good link, John.

"loony 11" was interesting in spite of it sounding like Canadian currency.

Thanks Ted.

[Black Pearl]

I remember getting a Mamiya C330f back in the late 80's and lugging it up the fells in Cumbria with a Weston meter. I got really concerned that every exposure throughout the day was basically the same and started to doubt myself - turns out on a bright sunny day (we do very occasionally get them in the UK) the light just doesn't change and the old Sunny 16 rules are still valid.

[ccphoto]

Because I was young (12) and totally uninformed (a blithering idiot), when my aunt gave me a camera to play around with, my only guidelines were experimentation. The camera was an old Leica (which I wish I still had) and there was a piece of paper taped to the back that said: 1/ASA at f:/16. It took me a week to figure out what an ASA was (ISO to you youngsters), and two more weeks and a lot of ruined film to figure out how to load the spools, and then another three or four weeks of testing the formula to find its sweet spot: f:/11 @ 1/250 did the sunny rule. 16 wasn't enough light, 8 too much. Between 10am and 2pm I could pretty much shoot whatever I wanted. It took another more months than I want to remember to extrapolate that information into lower light requirements, and faster shutter speeds...then I discovered there were people who actually wrote books about this....and the rest is still a lot of experimentation, only now with some hard-earned knowledge to work it all out. Too funny.

[Mike Buckley]

A friend now long deceased used only a film SLR that had no light meter. He never used an external light meter. He used only a 50mm lens and color slide film. For those of you who haven't shot film, color slide film is the least forgiving of all film in the sense that it is a positive film, which doesn't allow the exposure to be altered during development; what you take is what you get. He also never bracketed his exposures. I saw many, many of his slide shows and very distinctly remember commenting that finally he had shown one slide that its exposure was a little off.

His success in capturing such accurate exposures so consistently in all shooting situations was because he had mastered the Sunny 16 rule so well that he intuitively knew how to adjust it for early morning or late afternoon light, for cloudy conditions and the like.

[RBSinTo]

A friend now long deceased used only a film SLR that had no light meter. He never used an external light meter. He used only a 50mm lens and color slide film. For those of you who haven't shot film, color slide film is the least forgiving of all film in the sense that it is a positive film, which doesn't allow the exposure to be altered during development; what you take is what you get. He also never bracketed his exposures. I saw many, many of his slide shows and very distinctly remember commenting that finally he had shown one slide that its exposure was a little off.
His success in capturing such accurate exposures so consistently in all shooting situations was because he had mastered the Sunny 16 rule so well that he intuitively knew how to adjust it for early morning or late afternoon light, for cloudy conditions and the like.

Mike,
I still only shoot colour slide film, and among the far-too many cameras I own and use are three meterless Nikon rangefinders as well as a motorized , meterless Nikon F, and most of the time while on the streets and using them, I rely on the f16 rule for my exposures.
Robert

[DanK]

Cameras are like computers in that the better the equipment, the easier/faster/more efficient I think it is. At least that is the way it works for my computer experience!

My camera is a basic one but I figure until I can understand the settings better, I may as well beat around with it for awhile more until I think I can "graduate" to something better! <grin>

In terms of the exposure issues that are the subject of this thread, there isn't much to be gained by getting a better camera. I have used Canon bodies ranging from the near-bottom-of-the-line XT to the semipro 5D III, and the process of getting a good exposure is pretty much the same on all of them. All of them allow you to choose among several different types of metering, e.g., evaluative and spot, and all offer the same basic ways of controlling exposure. The better cameras have a few bells and whistles, and they have better ergonomics and controls, which makes it easier and faster to get the settings you want. However, for the most part, it's the same drill with most decent digital cameras. What you have to learn is the same.

[miatab]

When I read the entries on this thread, not only does it take me back to my mid-life years of my Nikon F2SB and sunny Mediterranean travel photography, but it also reminds me how fortunate I am to have discovered a forum where members are tolerant, humble people, and where vitriolic egotistical fools are absent or silent.

[Pippan]

tl;dr, Sunny f/16 is OK but with digital cameras it’s better to expose so highlights are just below clipping.

I'm curious about what others will think of this. In 1992 I was using an Olympus OM-1, an SLR with a light meter that showed a needle that you lined up with a scale by adjusting aperture and/or shutter speed, mostly with Kodachrome 64. However just before an overseas trip the meter stopped working. I ended up being away for a year and never got it fixed. I just used Sunny f/16 (with appropriate guesstimations for overcast, shade etc.) and most exposures looked fine when I finally got to see them. A more critical eye may have disagreed but I’ll never know now because I lost all the slides in a house fire.

Fast forward to the digital age, and although cameras now have sophisticated metering I have tried Sunny f/16 and the results are nearly always seriously underexposed. Why? Part of the reason is probably that ISO ratings are not true. My EOS 100D is about 1/3 stop below what the ISO says it is, and my 80D is 2/3 stop below. But the underexposure is usually a lot more than this.

It seems to me that digital photography is fundamentally different from film photography. With Kodachrome there was no ability to alter exposure after shooting (other than when printing) so you needed a suitable mid-range exposure that would look OK when projected, with highlights and shadows falling where they would. Also highlights didn’t blow like they can with digital so there wasn’t that important constraint.

With digital, you can easily adjust the exposure later, in post-processing, but with some constraints involving noise and banding. To keep noise as low as possible, you need to collect as much light as possible, to maximise the signal to noise ratio. This means exposing so important highlights are as close as possible to (preferably within 1/3 stop), but not beyond, the sensor’s clipping point. You can then adjust overall exposure to taste later, often bringing it down a bit and thereby reducing noise as well. This is called ETTR. So you expose for the highlights rather than (with Sunny f/16) the mid-tones.

For low dynamic range scenes (say 2-4 stops), or if there are no bright colours or whites in the scene, using Sunny f/16 with a digital camera will result in underexposure (in that the highlights might be 1-2 stops below clipping). Conversely, Sunny f/16 sometimes clips bright clouds. If you have time, one way to set exposure for a digital camera is to spot meter the brightest part of the image and add 3 stops if it’s fairly even brightness across the spot-meter area, or less (maybe 2 stops) if there are darker sections in the spot-meter area. If in doubt you can bracket and choose the optimum image later using FastRawViewer or RawDigger.

So while Sunny f/16 will get you in the ball-park, it can often be improved upon with digital cameras. One of my frustrations is that (AFAIK) no camera to date meters for ETTR (with a user-adjustable percentage of blown pixels to account for specular highlights or unimportant bright areas), nor displays histograms based on raw data, despite both being possible from the image data collected.

[Shadowman]

tl;dr, Sunny f/16 is OK but with digital cameras it’s better to expose so highlights are just below clipping.

I'm curious about what others will think of this. In 1992 I was using an Olympus OM-1, an SLR with a light meter that showed a needle that you lined up with a scale by adjusting aperture and/or shutter speed, mostly with Kodachrome 64. However just before an overseas trip the meter stopped working. I ended up being away for a year and never got it fixed. I just used Sunny f/16 (with appropriate guesstimations for overcast, shade etc.) and most exposures looked fine when I finally got to see them. A more critical eye may have disagreed but I’ll never know now because I lost all the slides in a house fire.

Fast forward to the digital age, and although cameras now have sophisticated metering I have tried Sunny f/16 and the results are nearly always seriously underexposed. Why? Part of the reason is probably that ISO ratings are not true. My EOS 100D is about 1/3 stop below what the ISO says it is, and my 80D is 2/3 stop below. But the underexposure is usually a lot more than this.

It seems to me that digital photography is fundamentally different from film photography. With Kodachrome there was no ability to alter exposure after shooting (other than when printing) so you needed a suitable mid-range exposure that would look OK when projected, with highlights and shadows falling where they would. Also highlights didn’t blow like they can with digital so there wasn’t that important constraint.

With digital, you can easily adjust the exposure later, in post-processing, but with some constraints involving noise and banding. To keep noise as low as possible, you need to collect as much light as possible, to maximise the signal to noise ratio. This means exposing so important highlights are as close as possible to (preferably within 1/3 stop), but not beyond, the sensor’s clipping point. You can then adjust overall exposure to taste later, often bringing it down a bit and thereby reducing noise as well. This is called ETTR. So you expose for the highlights rather than (with Sunny f/16) the mid-tones.

For low dynamic range scenes (say 2-4 stops), or if there are no bright colours or whites in the scene, using Sunny f/16 with a digital camera will result in underexposure (in that the highlights might be 1-2 stops below clipping). Conversely, Sunny f/16 sometimes clips bright clouds. If you have time, one way to set exposure for a digital camera is to spot meter the brightest part of the image and add 3 stops if it’s fairly even brightness across the spot-meter area, or less (maybe 2 stops) if there are darker sections in the spot-meter area. If in doubt you can bracket and choose the optimum image later using FastRawViewer or RawDigger.

So while Sunny f/16 will get you in the ball-park, it can often be improved upon with digital cameras. One of my frustrations is that (AFAIK) no camera to date meters for ETTR (with a user-adjustable percentage of blown pixels to account for specular highlights or unimportant bright areas), nor displays histograms based on raw data, despite both being possible from the image data collected.

I'll have to play with it a bit more today but I would expect there to be a difference between sunny 16 and the camera's metering system as one is reflective and the other incident meter. However, results tend to be rather close and as the shows sunny 16 can be tailored towards the photographer's vision.

[Mike Buckley]

I would expect using the Sunny 16 rule to be equally effective whether using a film camera or a digital camera, though I have never tried using it with a digital camera. I've never tried it because, for me, the primary difference between a digital camera and a film camera is that the digital camera provides a histogram, allowing the user to adjust the exposure if needed except in very rare shooting situations when that's not practical.

I would expect there to be a difference between sunny 16 and the camera's metering system as one is reflective and the other incident meter.

The same is true when using a digital camera. So, in that respect I see no difference between applying the Sunny 16 rule for use with a digital or film camera.

[William W]

I'm curious about what others will think of this . . .

. . . Sunny f/16 is OK but with digital cameras it’s better to expose so highlights are just below clipping.

Generally agree.

Moreover - if you know (all of) the F/16 Rule and its variants and if you also know your digital camera’s threshold, then you can get precisely that: “highlights are just below clipping.”

*

. . . to the digital age, and although cameras now have sophisticated metering I have tried Sunny f/16 and the results are nearly always seriously underexposed. Why? Part of the reason is probably that ISO ratings are not true. My EOS 100D is about 1/3 stop below what the ISO says it is, and my 80D is 2/3 stop below. But the underexposure is usually a lot more than this.

I don’t know why. We would have to look at the data you collected.

I have used the F/16 Rule for many years and it has never been under (or over) by more than ⅓ Stop.

I have tested this numerous times with a colleague in San Francisco and she reported the same accuracy of the F/16 Rule: she like I had used (nonexclusively) the F/16 Rule for (Film) Outdoor Portraiture for many years. (She used the same DSLRs as I and we were specifically testing camera thresholds.)

*

. . . It seems to me that digital photography is fundamentally different from film photography. With Kodachrome there was no ability to alter exposure after shooting (other than when printing) so you needed a suitable mid-range exposure that would look OK when projected, with highlights and shadows falling where they would. Also highlights didn’t blow like they can with digital so there wasn’t that important constraint.

Not sure what you mean by "[with Kodachrome] you needed a suitable mid-range exposure"

Kodachrome could and would blow highlights.

That is the point of why so many Kodachrome users (me included) used (or referred to) the F/16 Rule - so as to NEVER blow the highlights - hopefully you can see the detail in the white tiles and grout, front sunlit - I think I lost a bit of his hair - maybe the scan quality or the Kodachrome deterioration.



"Stage Door", Sydney, circa. 1976 (Kodachrome 25)

*

. . . With digital, you can easily adjust the exposure later, in post-processing, but with some constraints involving noise and banding. To keep noise as low as possible, you need to collect as much light as possible, to maximise the signal to noise ratio. This means exposing so important highlights are as close as possible to (preferably within 1/3 stop), but not beyond, the sensor’s clipping point. You can then adjust overall exposure to taste later, often bringing it down a bit and thereby reducing noise as well. This is called ETTR. So you expose for the highlights rather than (with Sunny f/16) the mid-tones. .

That occurs to me as a statement made which is predicated upon a misunderstanding of the F/16 Rule.

And actually you can't really easily adjust the exposure later with digital, you can change the 'exposure' slider, but that is not the same as capturing the data of the file at a different exposure.

In simple terms - The F/16 Rule is:

a) for Full Sunlight Front Lit Subjects
b) for Subjects in daylight between about 2~3 hours after sunrise and 2~3 hours before sunset*1
c) for Subjects photographed in latitudes between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn*1
d) Note (*1) 3 hours or a bit more, after and before Sunrise and Sunset in Wintertime, as you get closer to the Tropics
e) for sunlight in a typical outdoor scene – i.e. Neither Beach Sand nor White Snow

*

If you know the clipping threshold of your digital camera, then you can use the F/16 rule to accurately nail the correct exposure for the direct SUNLIGHT ILLUMINATED area of the image and you can add the camera’s clipping threshold for ETTR if you want to .

Note: for artistic reasons, the particular exposure determined by the F/16 Rule might or might not be the exposure that you want for the final image file of the whole scene: but it will be an accurate exposure for the Front Lit Sunlight Areas of the Image no matter what are the colours of the those sunlight front lit areas; and no matter what is the Dynamic Range of the scene.

The F/16 Rule, in its correct technical application and when it is premised upon the constancy of the Sunlight during most of the day across most of the Earth (i.e. the constant intensity of the Sun), is quite similar to taking an Incident Light Meter Reading in direct sunlight on a cloudless day - that incident meter reading will be constant across most of the Earth (as defined above) for the daylight hours (described above).

WW

Image © AJ Group Pty Ltd Aust 1996~2017 WMW 1965~1996

[William W]

I would expect using the Sunny 16 rule to be equally effective whether using a film camera or a digital camera, though I have never tried using it with a digital camera. That's because, for me, the primary difference between a digital camera and a film camera is that the digital camera provides a histogram, allowing the user to adjust the exposure if needed except in very rare shooting situations when that's not practical. The same is true when using a digital camera. So, in that respect I see no difference between applying the Sunny 16 rule for use with a digital or film camera.

Exactly – if one re reads my commentary – I could (and will) rephrase using the above –

The F/16 Rule was often used as a pseudo Histogram or Clipping Meter, especially for Photographers who used Kodochrome or Ektachrome. The point is these emulsions were NOT tolerant to overexposure in the highlights and the F/16 Rule (and its variants, for example for degrees of cloud cover ) were used as a safety check of the exposure, to ensure that there was NO (unintentional) loss of any of the highlight detail.

Hopefully this technique is evident in the sample above, where I employed the F/16 Rule for that shot I made with a Minolta “SR” series camera – probably my Minolta SR 7 and my 135mm lens.

WW

[Pippan]

Thanks again for your detailed explanation. This is the sort of thing I was looking for.

Re my cameras' ISO differences, it's not just my copies of them, it's as measured by DXO and often appears to explain the amount of compensation I need to use to get good exposures when using Sunny f/16 in bright sunny conditions.

Re the rest of it, I'll have to digest it and do lots of testing with my cameras tomorrow. I probably, as you say, do not fully understand Sunny f/16 and maybe fail to compensate enough for scenes that aren't properly sunlit. I also take your point on the word 'exposure' in post-processing--poor choice of words, it isn't changing exposure just as altering ISO isn't altering exposure.

Interesting that you say Sunny 16 is for the tropics (obviously I live between those two Tropics), I was unaware of that.

[Mike Buckley]

I have used the F/16 Rule for many years and it has never been under (or over) by more than ⅓ Stop.

When I was using it with color slide film and with consumer-grade zoom lenses and cameras beginning in the 1980s that weren't nearly as good as the equipment I now use, it was not unusual that the exposure would be off by about 1/2 stop. Indeed, I tested the accuracy of my equipment during the ideal Sunny 16 conditions you described and when filling the frame with green grass. Once I had documented the inaccuracy of my equipment, if any, I compensated from that point going forward in my application of the Sunny 16 rule. I doubt that any of that would have been necessary using pro-quality camera bodies and prime lenses, which at the time were far better in many respects than even pro-quality zoom lenses.