Sunny-16 metering ---- best tips about judging light intensity?

[photonsoup]

Every box of 35mm Kodak film that I got had the Sunny Sixteen instructions printed on the inside of the box.
It's all I had from Jr. High until I was about 24 when I got a camera with a meter in it. It worked great. The camera with the meter was terrible with Sunny Sixteen. It had a zoom lens, it took me quite a while to figure out the marked f-stops are only good at one spot on the zoom scale.

[bob carnie]

This is a perfect chart. looking at the strength of the shadow will also help determine.

I have found nothing better than this. However, I use that scale for large format ISO 400 film exposures, not 200. With the price of 8x10 film I'll admit that I'd go back home to get the meter. For smaller formats I'll use this guide along with the meter. Though in the last 5 years I have shifted most of my smaller format work to cameras with matrix metering and 'Auto.'

Attachment 139881

[onnect17]

I use the rule 100/16 pretty often, keeping in mind the location and conditions and it works pretty well.

Balancing the light temperature is obviously important with color but it is also helpful with BW to assess the correct esposure. Checking the sprectral response in the film datasheet is not a bad idea.
Reflectance level of the surface is also important. In the presence of snow or a very white sand. That could add up to a full stop.

Last week a passed by a common tourist Stop-By spot in the Death Valley called Mesquite Dunes. Some dry trees face the parking and it called my attention the nice illumination observed on the branches. The sand itsefl is not that white so I took a closer look at the sand just to notice a good amount of what it seems like mica. That extra reflection would amount easily to a 1/3 or 1/2 stop correcction.

IMHO, the rule, properly used under the right condition, beats the best meter.

[David_Senesac]

Of course since photographers have meters either inside their cameras or dedicated exposure meters, we have little incentive to try and gauge light values with our eyes. Although the little chart just shows aperture F values it of course needs a complementary ISO and shutter speed to have meaning. Thus the sunny-16 rule requires one to set their shutter speed to the reciprocal of ISO. For example with ISO 200 film, aperture at F16 shutter speed 1/200 second. And when it is not sunny, charts like yours shown can help.

The more exact photography light value unit are EV numbers. The problem however with EV levels is not many photography tools are designed around displaying or thinking in EV and as a result few photographers think in terms of EV levels. My digital exposure meter is the relatively simple Shepherd Polaris Dual 5 which has a 5 degree spot sensor in addition to an ambient/reflected sensor. For years I have used the ambient in EV mode most of the time that few other photographers probably use. Thus there are no aperture or shutter speed displays just light levels. To select those 2 camera settings, I refer to charts although most commonly used settings I've memorized. In doing so I have become rather talented at guessing light levels in EV units before I actually look at meter readings. My skill at doing so is not too accurate if I haven't been out in the field for some time, but after a little time in the field it comes back. Of course that becomes more difficult below EV10 as light becomes dimmer. As a photographer there is value to developing sensitivity to all varying qualities of light.

David
http://www.davidsenesac.com/2015_Tri...r_2015-13.html

[Kevin Crisp]

As an interesting exercise -- assuming you keep notes -- go back through your 'outdoor' photography data and notice the remarkable lack of variability in your exposures. I'll bet 75% of mine are the same thing.