Why the 'Sunny 16' rule doesn't work.

[Ornello]

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On 10/23/2021 at 12:11 PM, pop said:

I don't think this is the case.

The argument mainly consists of two parts:

One: determining the 'desired' exposure
Two: applying the exposure to the film.

The "theory" says that cameras with central shutters expose the film more than cameras with focal plane shutters at the same settings. If that was the case, you could simply take two cameras with the same film, say a Rolleiflex TLR and any Leica M or R model. Setting identical exposure values would consistently result in the Leica photographs being darker than the Rolleiflex ones. It should become immediately apparent whether central shutters tend to overexpose in comparison with focal plane shutters.

Assume for the nonce that central shutters tend to overexpose in comparison with focal plane shutters. In this case, they should do so consistently, regardless of the method used to determine the exposure values. You could choose an exposure time at random and use that with both shutters; the central shutter should produce the brighter image.

Hence, a systematic tendency of any photographic device to over- or underexpose for any given set of settings is not a good measure for the quality of the method used to determine the exposure values.

Conclusion: if the shutter technology renders the sunny 16 rule invalid, it also renders the measurements by - say - a Gossen Lunasix invalid.

 

Correct! That's what I said! The ASA procedures were determined using the shutters of the time, which back in the 40s and 50s, were mostly lead shutters.

[Michael Geschlecht]

On 10/23/2021 at 12:11 PM, pop said:

I don't think this is the case.

The argument mainly consists of two parts:

One: determining the 'desired' exposure
Two: applying the exposure to the film.

The "theory" says that cameras with central shutters expose the film more than cameras with focal plane shutters at the same settings. If that was the case, you could simply take two cameras with the same film, say a Rolleiflex TLR and any Leica M or R model. Setting identical exposure values would consistently result in the Leica photographs being darker than the Rolleiflex ones. It should become immediately apparent whether central shutters tend to overexpose in comparison with focal plane shutters.

Assume for the nonce that central shutters tend to overexpose in comparison with focal plane shutters. In this case, they should do so consistently, regardless of the method used to determine the exposure values. You could choose an exposure time at random and use that with both shutters; the central shutter should produce the brighter image.

Hence, a systematic tendency of any photographic device to over- or underexpose for any given set of settings is not a good measure for the quality of the method used to determine the exposure values.

Conclusion: if the shutter technology renders the sunny 16 rule invalid, it also renders the measurements by - say - a Gossen Lunasix invalid.

 

Hello Philipp,

If I remember correctly, in my Kodak Master Photo Guide from around 1974, in the section dealing with exposures using leaf shutters set at high speeds such as 1/500 & lenses set at small apertures, such as f16 & smaller, there is a compensation table to adjust for this.

My copy is currently packed away & hard to get at. Perhaps someone with a copy could look it up. Most Kodak instructional publications for photographers are pretty reliable.

Best Regards,

Michael

Edited October 25, 2021 by Michael Geschlecht

[Ornello]

17 hours ago, Michael Geschlecht said:

Hello Philipp,

If I remember correctly, in my Kodak Master Photo Guide from around 1974, in the section dealing with exposures using leaf shutters set at high speeds such as 1/500 & lenses set at small apertures, such as f16 & smaller, there is a compensation table to adjust for this.

My copy is currently packed away & hard to get at. Perhaps someone with a copy could look it up. Most Kodak instructional publications for photographers are pretty reliable.

Best Regards,

Michael

Yes, so focal-plane shutters give less exposure at f/16 than leaf shutters do.

[andym91]

Sunny 16 works.

it’s a guideline and unless you really mess up it’s going to give you a good exposure within +- 1 stop.

film latitude can handle that easily.

sure in some geographies it may be Sunny 22 or Sunny 11 but even with that range you’re going to be worst case a stop off.

Now if you read the light wrong then that’s another story 😉

it’s worked well for me on leaf shutter cameras ( Retina and Rolleiflex) as well as M meterless cameras and digital in manual mode.

By the way when using ASA 400 film I always use 1/250 and not 1/500 , for sure you’ll be underexposed at 1/500 th.

 

good light

andy 

 

[earleygallery]

Sunny 16 has always worked for me.

I will caveat that - where I live (greater London) I find that it's more like sunny 11 apart from the very brightest/hottest days in summer around noon.

[Ornello]

2 hours ago, earleygallery said:

Sunny 16 has always worked for me.

I will caveat that - where I live (greater London) I find that it's more like sunny 11 apart from the very brightest/hottest days in summer around noon.

Yes, that's what I have found too. I think the 'rule' is wrong.

[earleygallery]

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12 hours ago, Ornello said:

Yes, that's what I have found too. I think the 'rule' is wrong.

I wouldn’t say it’s wrong, it’s just that one must adjust it to suit the local conditions. 

If you’re in the Med, or somewhere in Australia on a bright sunny day then it’ll definitely be sunny 16!

 

[LocalHero1953]

Anyone know who invented Sunny 16? Where did they live?

[Gibbo]

Are you going to 'send the boys' round? 😎

[willeica]

On 10/23/2021 at 11:43 PM, 250swb said:

it covers overt mistakes

Mistakes or what the photographer intended? There are no absolutes when it comes to photography,  just whether the photographer/viewer likes the results. Digital is the same, but with less room to manoeuvre as is the case with transparencies. If you know an absolutely correct way of doing things, then let us know. I'm quite happy with 'it works for me'. It has worked for me for quite a number of years.

I recently had the privilege of examining about 80 170 year old waxed calotypes. There were multiple copies of several of the images and when I examined them closely I found that the photographer was, indeed, bracketing and this was long before an exposure meter of any kind existed. The images are superb and , yes, 'it worked for him'.

I had the same conversation yesterday with a photographer friend who does wet plate photography. She had learnt the sensitivity of the materials used vary over time and again she used the same trial and error approach as the photographer from 170 years ago and, yes, it 'worked for her'.

William 

[pgk]

46 minutes ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Anyone know who invented Sunny 16? Where did they live?

I think that it was Kodak in Rochester, New York. Maybe someone in NY City can confirm whether its a good rule there?

[250swb]

1 hour ago, willeica said:

Mistakes or what the photographer intended? There are no absolutes when it comes to photography,  just whether the photographer/viewer likes the results. Digital is the same, but with less room to manoeuvre as is the case with transparencies. If you know an absolutely correct way of doing things, then let us know. I'm quite happy with 'it works for me'. It has worked for me for quite a number of years.

 

I was referring to the latitude of film being used as an reason that makes the Sunny 16 theory achieve an haphazardly exposed negative. Achieving what the photographer intends would be covered by using actual facts and a meter, he/she can then adjust the exposure and development to achieve exactly what was intended (Adams busted a gut over this). It's a similar situation with the weather, measurements can be taken and an accurate forecast made, or you can trust to the latitude of a wet finger stuck in the air to feel which way the wind is blowing. Sunny 16 is therefore the photographers wet finger, except worse because they've bought a Leica for it's superb engineering and lenses and then metaphorically rely on spit to make it work.

Edited October 27, 2021 by 250swb

[Doug A]

17 minutes ago, 250swb said:

... Sunny 16 is therefore the photographers wet finger, except worse because they've bought a Leica for it's superb engineering and lenses and then metaphorically rely on spit to make it work.

Leica's engineering and lenses have nothing to do with exposure. It's the same roll of film my friend uses in her Argus C3  :-)

I live right across the Raritan Bay from New York City. Sunny 16 works fine in the summer. It's more like Sunny 11 on a clear winter day. (Unless there is clean white snow on the ground in which case Sunny 22 is more like it.)

I doubt that the original users of my pre WW II Barnack Leica's used light meters. My father certainly didn't. His contact prints from that era show that he was bracketing. Almost without exception his first exposure is dead on and his second "safety" frame is denser the it needs to be.

[250swb]

50 minutes ago, Doug A said:

Leica's engineering and lenses have nothing to do with exposure. It's the same roll of film my friend uses in her Argus C3  🙂

I live right across the Raritan Bay from New York City. Sunny 16 works fine in the summer. It's more like Sunny 11 on a clear winter day. (Unless there is clean white snow on the ground in which case Sunny 22 is more like it.)

I doubt that the original users of my pre WW II Barnack Leica's used light meters. My father certainly didn't. His contact prints from that era show that he was bracketing. Almost without exception his first exposure is dead on and his second "safety" frame is denser the it needs to be.

Exposure meters to calculate exposure were around even before the William's example of 170 year old wax calotypes. It's a mistake to imagine a meter as only a photoelectric device, it is simply a device that allows something to be measured. And I don't disbelieve your story about your father, my father also never used a light meter even though he did own one, but he never thought of himself as a photographer in the way we do on this forum. And while the olden days are called to give evidence by the Sunny 16 lobby this is 2021 and the craft of photography should be at it's height with Leica Apo lenses, knowledge, and such like, and yet nostalgia for the crude instructions written on a cardboard box hold sway. Ah for the good old days of smallpox and not having a heater in a car 😉

http://www.earlyphotography.co.uk/site/meters.html

 

 

Edited October 27, 2021 by 250swb

[Michael Geschlecht]

3 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Anyone know who invented Sunny 16? Where did they live?

Hello Paul,

A long time ago I read that "Sunny 16" came about because: A long time ago film speed was determined by: What combination of lens opening & shutter speed was necessary for that specific film to have a proper exposure, in a place outdoors, where the Sun was shining directly, at 12 Noon, on the first day of Summer, in the Capital of the Country, in which the film was made.

Best Regards,

Michael

[andybarton]

The film speed will have been determined in the factory. The Sunny 16 rule is the response to the film speed.

Correct exposure in Oslo, on the first day of Summer, will be completely different from the same day in Cairo.

Sunny 16 (or 11 or 22) is a response to typical conditions in the place where you are. It's something that you have to learn and is based upon experience and some personal experimentation.

[Anbaric]

I used to be pretty good at estimating exposure by eye (at least in reasonably bright daylight) using some version of the Sunny 16 rule. As Andy says, it comes with experience and experimentation. In my case I was using an unmetered IIIc some of the time, and a metered Nikon SLR on other occasions, and got into the habit of second guessing the meter reading when it was available. One day I was out with the SLR and it bothered me that the reading was consistently a stop out from what I was expecting. It took a while for the penny to drop - I'd loaded film that was twice the speed I normally used! So my eye was in, but my brain was out to lunch. I certainly saw Sunny 16 conditions at times, as confirmed by the meter and satisfactory exposures. But in London that was at noon on a cloudless summer day with hard shadows, not at 3PM in September. You need to be able to recognise the difference.

[adan]

On this web page, there is an image (the 4th) of the exposure tables Rollei built right into their unmetered TLR cameras (because those had a lot of otherwise unused real estate on the back ). And of course they were leaf-shutter cameras.

https://www.thedarkroom.it/inthedarkroom/2014/10/the-sunny-16-rule-how-to-take-photos-without-the-use-of-a-light-meter/

Interestingly (and in Italian) it recommends a "sunny 16" exposure of 1/ISO and f/16, only "at the beach or in high mountains." Spiaggia e Alta Montagna. Guidance for most pictures in general is f/11 or f/8 and 1/ISO.

...........................

There is a funny historical quirk related to negative size, that can make a difference in "correct" exposure depending on the format - and explains in part why the ISO/ASA re-rated films in the late 1950s.

B&W negative film is more tolerant of overexposure than underexposure - if the negative is large, the enlargement small (or non-existent - contact prints) and grain is thus a minor factor. If one is going to err, err on the side of more exposure (Sunny f/8-11).

Once 35mm negatives arrived (and had to be significantly enlarged to produce usable photos), it was noted that with the greater enlargement, pictures made "the old-fashioned way" appeared very grainy in the highlights (dense parts of the negatives) and also lost acutance or edge sharpness due to light diffusion or halation. It became a significant part of "small-negative photography" in the 1930s-1950s to seek out or create "fine-grain developers" - and also to give 35mm pictures the absolute minimum exposure required. Or one lost a lot of the glory of the Leica/Zeiss small-format lenses.

Once 35mm not only existed, but began to dominate the market/industry in the 1950s - then the ISO/ASA (and maybe DIN - not that familiar with their history) organizations revised the film speed ratings to reflect the need for "delicate, gentle" exposures in the now-dominant format. And Rollei's Sunny 11 - or even Sunny f/8 "in the street" (scene di strada) - vanished into the mists of history.

.........................

Sometime in the 1970s, Camera 35 columnist (and TIME photographer, and Leica maven) Bill Pierce wrote an article titled "Down and Dirty Metering."

In it, he described a fictitious dream where he was photographing a garden plant with his Leica. He was using his hand-held spot meter and metering all the different tones of the subject: the bottom of the leaves, the top of the leaves, the floral highlights and shadows, the background blur. After 5 minutes of this, another shadow fell over his subject, and he turned to see Ansel Adams standing beside him. And Adams leaned over, and whispered in his ear.........."Bracket!"

........................

Camera 35 also published an interview with the darkroom printer who handled a lot of work for Magnum over the years - including HC-B's. He described making a 16x20 print from a famous HC-B negative (he wouldn't reveal which) - that was so dense and grossly overexposed that the print-maker simply turned on the enlarger - and went out to lunch for 90 minutes. The print came out just right.

[250swb]

Thank you Andy for explaining very succinctly the Sunny 16 rule is not as benign as widely assumed. I made the point about grain and sharpness relating to exposure but when people won't believe me I think, and hope, they do believe you.

Edited October 27, 2021 by 250swb

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[pgk]

56 minutes ago, adan said:

Camera 35 also published an interview with the darkroom printer who handled a lot of work for Magnum over the years - including HC-B's. He described making a 16x20 print from a famous HC-B negative (he wouldn't reveal which) - that was so dense and grossly overexposed that the print-maker simply turned on the enlarger - and went out to lunch for 90 minutes. The print came out just right.

Not the only account of dodgy HCB exposures I've come across. Doesn't really matter though because many of his images are good enough to withstand some technical failings.