Nailing manual exposures

I was doing, yet again, some research for shooting without a light meter. As you may know, this is a topic that really interests me at the moment. My plan is to go completely lightmeterless some day and I’ve been exploring the sunny 16 rule extensively. I stumbled upon some really good in-depth pointers, that I’d like to share. To get the most out of these tips, you should be familiar with the basics of sunny 16. I guess these will apply to digital photography as well, but I’m writing this more or less from a film shooter’s perspective.

1. When in doubt, overexpose

Film latitude has been a bit of a mystery for me. I shoot mostly Tri-x and they say it has great latitude. But just how great and how to substantiate it? I’ve sometimes overexposed Tri-x by accident many many stops and still got an image. My hunch has always been that it can take a serious overexposing and still work. I was happy to see other film shooters encouraging intentional overexposing. It takes some stress of me when being uncertain, whether overexposing a stop or two, will ruin the image. The consensus seems to be that no, it does not ruin the image, and you should in fact overexpose on purpose if you are in doubt. Next time when I’m having a hard time figuring out the exposure, I know to learn towards overexposing to increase the chances of nailing it.

2. Using f8 as default f-stop

F8 is a good all-round aperture to guarantee that you’ll get a somewhat good exposure. It is a small enough opening on bright conditions to not to overexpose too badly, but not too small to underexpose. If the light conditions give too much of a challenge, f8 is a good bet. This is an awesome tip! I’ve stumbled upon a situation many times, where I’m uncertain of which f-stop to choose and quickly just made an educated guess on whether to punch in f11, f8 or f5.6. I’m glad to have a solution on my toolkit for the next time. If I’m totally clueless and have to make a quick decision, I’m using f8 as my default emergency aperture.

As a side note, f8 is my favourite aperture for pure aesthetic reasons too. Ideally I don’t like defaulting to over-blown bokeh, that can be achieved by shooting wide open on a f1.8 lens. I don’t necessarily like the opposite f16 look either, where you get a tack sharp image from foreground to background. F8 can give you a moderate and sophisticated amount of background blur, which is just the kind on look I like.

3. Making it sunny 11 instead of sunny 16

This tip is also related to slight overexposing and that is to approach sunny 16 more like a sunny 11 rule. I live in Finland and I’ve heard many other fellow finns mentioning the same thing. I’ve read a similar suggestion made by film shooters from the UK. Someone who has the science facts, could back this up, but my hunch is that far up in north the sunlight might not be just as bright as in closer to equator. I can certainly back this up by my own field research, as I have clearly noticed to get slightly better exposures by shooting on f11 on a bright sunny day.

I hope you found these tips as helpful as I did. Sunny 16 is a pretty simple rule and I’ve had great results using it. Small additional tips like these though, will increase so much confidence to the shooting experience. The basic form of sunny 16 will give you the initial advice, but there are plenty of “what if” situations that require advanced understanding.