Outdoor Photography: Sunny F16 Rule

Video Transcript

"In this next clip I'm going to talk about the sunny F16 rule which is a very basic rule of thumb for gauging proper exposure out in the bright sun. Let's talk a little bit about the sunny F16 rule which is the basic rule of thumb for shooting outdoors. What that rule is, is if you're shooting in bright sunlight as we are today, the proper exposure at F16, so your aperture is at F16, the proper exposure is one over your film speed. So if you're shooting ISO 100 on a sunny day at F16 your proper exposure is 1/100. Now let's talk a little bit about generally exposure and how you get a proper exposure. There's three things you can play with. One is your aperture or your f-stop. Two is your film speed or how sensitive your digital sensor is to light, and three is your shutter speed. All three of those interact to give you the proper exposure. Let me tell you a little bit about how that works. Think about filling a bucket with water. The bucket, the size of the bucket is how fast your film is. If it's a small bucket your film is fast, it fills up very quickly. The water is the light. If you have a big bucket, or slow film, you need more water in there to fill it up and get the proper exposure. So you control it with two things, your f-stop which is your aperture, the hole in the camera, the bigger the number is the smaller actually the hole is. So it's like a small pipe of water. F-stops are a little confusing because the bigger number like F16 or F22 actually means a smaller hole or smaller pipe if we're thinking about our water analogy. The bigger number the bigger aperture is actually the smaller number. F4, F2.8 is bigger so imagine a bigger hose getting more water into your bucket. So you either have a big aperture, 2.8, or a small aperture let's say F16 or F22, and that controls how much water, or light, is going into your film or your bucket. And then finally, is the film speed, or the shutter speed excuse me, if you're shooting at one-thirtieth of a second or one-two hundredth, that also is the amount of time you're allowing the light or water to go onto the film. And that is generally the relationship between aperture, film speed, and shutter speed."