Photo Quick Tip: Sunny 16 Rule
This is the next installment in my series of Quick Tips for photographers. This one is an oldie but a goodie…
Sometimes your camera will be confused by the lighting conditions around it. In those cases it’s always a good idea to have a feeling for a good starting point for what the correct exposure settings to use will be.
Way back in the olden days (before histograms and light meters were built into the camera), photographers had to do this in their heads, and they had to do it all the time. They developed lots of rules of thumb to help. Here’s one that you can used to determine the correct exposure on a bright sunny day.
The Sunny 16 Rule
On a bright sunny day, if you set your aperture (or F-stop) to f/16, then the shutter speed required to get a good exposure will simply be 1 / ISO.
Some modifiers for this rule:
- If you are at a white sandy beach or shooting in snow then you may need to stop down by 1 stop to cut glare and reflections.
- If your background is darker or there are important areas of the scene in the shade then you may need to open up by 1 stop to fill in the shadows.
- You may have to “salt to taste” to get an exposure that matches your creative expectation!
NOTE – If you need a refresher on Aperture, F-stop, Stop Down, or Open Up, then check out my earlier post on Apertures and F-stops.
For the Advanced Class
f/16 at 1/ISO should be considered to be your starting point, and you can always add salt to taste if you want to change the look of the image (Tip – use the histogram on your LCD to check your exposure). You can also use that exposure information to calculate a whole series of equivalent exposures depending on the creative decisions you want to make.
For example, if you want to blur the background then you might want to use f/2.8 instead of f/16. In this case you simply need to figure out how many full stops brighter f/2.8 is than f/16, and then take away that much light be increasing the shutter speed or decreasing the ISO.
Every time you move either the Aperture, the Shutter, or the ISO from one of the standard settings in the table above to the adjacent setting to the left of it, you are “Stopping Down” your exposure by 1 full stop, which means you will use half the light of the previous setting. As you move to the right you “Open Up” by 1 full stop, which means you will get twice as much light. If you Stop Down the aperture by one stop, then you must Open Up the Shutter or the ISO by one stop in order to maintain the equivalent exposure.
A practical example: Moving from f/16 to f/2.8 is 5 full stops more light. To achieve an equivalent exposure you would have to take away 5 stops. You could do that by Stopping Down the ISO or the Shutter. Changing the ISO from 3200 down to 100, or increasing the Shutter Speed from 1/4 sec up to 1/125th sec are equivalent moves.
NOTE – Modern cameras allow many more choices for Aperture, Shutter, and ISO. They generally allow adjustments in half, third, or even quarter stops. It is very important that you understand how much you have to change to affect your exposure by a full stop! And as always, practice makes perfect!
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