What Is the Sunny 16 Rule in Photography?
And how do you use it?
There are a lot of rules in photography; the rule of thirds, expose to the right, and many others. But one that has been around for many years and most new photographers don’t know, is the Sunny 16 rule. This article will explain what it is and how you can use it in your photography.
The Sunny 16 rule goes back to the days of film photography and even before cameras came with a built-in light meter. Many professional photographers carried a hand-held light meter with them, but they were expensive, and most amateurs and hobbyists couldn’t afford them. So they invented the Sunny 16 rule. This formula was an easy rule to remember for calculating the proper exposure settings if you didn’t have a way to meter the scene.
As you can probably guess, they made the Sunny 16 rule to use on sunny days, and the 16 referred to the aperture, f16. You then set the shutter speed to the closest one on your camera to the reciprocal of your ISO, or as they called it in those days, ASA. As in today’s digital cameras, ASA referred to the speed of the film. So putting this in practical terms, if you were shooting on a sunny day, with ASA 100 film, you set the aperture to f16 and the shutter speed to 1/125th. ASA 200 required 1/200th, and so on.
