sunny 16?

[buxton]

Just got my first rangefinder the other day, a FED 2(b or maybe c). Am anxious to put some film through it and see if it needs tuning and cleaning. ...feels good though.
I am too cheap to buy a light meter, and like the idea of learning how to guess exposure close enough to get it right by bracketing a couple stops one way or the other. Was reading about the "sunny 16" method, which would be something like this for 400 speed film ...as I understand it:

f/22@1/400 - very bright conditions such as full sun on snow
f/16@1/400 - full sun
f/11@1/400 - slightly overcast
f/8@1/400 - cloudy or shade
f/5.6@1/400 - dark clouds
f/4@1/400 - rain

I was pretty excited to read about this method of guessing exposure as it looks easy to remember. Thought I'd try it out, using the light meter in my canon 300d. Today was raining, so I expected it to read f/4@1/400 with 400 speed film. To my dismay it read that f/4@1/30 was the correct exposure. ...which leads me to think that I need to not only increase the aperture, but decrease the shutter speed for each of the above settings, which -might- look something like this:

f/22@1/600 - very bright conditions such as full sun on snow
f/16@1/400 - full sun
f/11@1/300 - slightly overcast
f/8@1/200 - cloudy or shade
f/5.6@1/150 - dark clouds
f/4@1/100 - rain


There seems to be quite a bit of experience on this forum, was hoping someone could straighten me out. ...am I understanding the "sunny 16" method at all?

 

[wlewisiii]

See here: http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm for the best explaination I've seen.

William

 

[w3rk5]

Hi and welcome buxton. I don't shoot with a light meter either. This link has helped me out a lot.


http://www.fredparker.com/ultexp1.htm

LOL! You beat me to it William.

 

[Dracotype]

The important thing that must be pointed out is that your camera's meter, is averaging your entire scene (I generalize, but that is what center weighted metering essentially does) so as to render it 18% gray. Remember, however, that this does not always give the correct rendition of the tones in the scene. Also remember that incident metering measures the amount of ambient light (by this I mean the amount of light around). Sunny 16 is essentially incident metering. You are guesstimating the amount of light around. And it works. I have used it quite successfully many times. I had to use this when I first got into photography. Not the best of feelings, not knowing how things were going to turnn out. But the glow of pride is very satisfying.

But be warned, only during daylight, never during the magic hours or dawn/dusk. It is very difficult at these times to guess the amount of light about. But during daylight, you can't beat it. I now use a meter, but still like to test myself everyonce and a while. It works.

Drew

 

[Finder]

You have the basic idea, but it is harder to put into practice. Just seasonal changes can be big - summer sun can be significantly brighter than winter sun (at least in these parts). The sunny 16 works best with negative film as you have a larger opps factor. But while the eye is remarkable sensitive to detecting relative differences in brightness, it is bad at measure absolute brightness. A meter can actually help you to learn to guess exposure. But it will never be anything better than a guess.