As you know, the sunny 16 rule is the corner stone of all manual exposure rules. How ever, as the name implies, it only tells you exposure settings for bright daylight scenarios. I made this extended chart that goes beyond the basic lighting situations and tells you the settings for rainy day and indoor scanarios as well.

The chart is a freebie and you can save it to your phone for a quick access cheat sheet.
Grab it here: pekkakeskinen.com/s/extended-sunny-16-exposure-chart.jpg

I’ve been personally using this chart for years with a pretty good success rate.

Shooting in bare daylight on a bright summer day is relatively easy. The less light there is, the trickier the exposures get. At least this is my experience. I love shooting with very old cameras and my Leica M4, for example, doesn’t have a lightmeter. I do have a basic hand-held lightmeter (Gossen Sixtino) but when I can’t be bothered to carry it with me (that is to say, the times that I forget to bring it along… and believe me, that happens often) I think it’s very usefull to have memorized some basic exposure settings for the most common lighting situations.

I think is a bit weird that a classic exposure rule such as the sunny 16 just basically stops giving advice after EV 13. You’d think that there would be an extended set of rules for conditions beyond those basic settings, because lighting and weater conditions certainly doesn’t end there. It should be common knowledge, but if you do a Google search, what you’ll find tend to emphasize just sunny 16 based basic rules. So if you’re anything like me and have been wishing for a handy solutions for the problem in a smart phone friendly format, well here you go… you’re more than welcome to try these settings out.

From the easiest to the hardest settings

EV’s 10—12 (the rainy day settings) are the hardest in my opinion. That is the area where I most commonly need the assistance of a lightmeter. If I don’t have a meter, I tend to underexpose one or two stops by accident. This is why I want to have a cheat sheet, some kind of documentation of proven settings as well.

Low light situations are surprisingly easy, I’ve found. Film loves light and it is much harder to over expose it in low light situations, than to underexpose it, which happens freguently. Indoor lighting tends to be relatively dim for film’s standards, so just giving it pretty much as long exposure that you’re comfortable holding without a tripod, will get you far.

Street views at night are also much easier than you would think. If the light is extremely low, just shoot wide open with the longest shutter speed that you can manage without camera shake. Sounds idiotically simple, but if you don’t have anything else than this knowledge to use, it will work surprisigly well.

Tricky situations

Exposure rules such as these as a good basic starting points, but not the whole truth. Each lighting situation is of course unique, but memorizing and understanding concepts like these can really help you to understand exposure.

Remember that knowledge and understanding are not the same things. Knowledge is basically just data (text and numbers on a chart etc.) but you still need to have the understanding in order to utilize the knowledge. That is to say, don’t blindly do what the chart is telling you, but apply your own thinking and judgement as well.

There may be times when you need to compensate or average out multiple values, much like taking spot readings from few selected points from the scene. For example a high contrast scene might be a nightmare to expose correctly.

Let’s say that you photographing a hight contrast scene that is anything but flat light situation, featuring blistering bright areas of direct sun light (high EV numbers) and really dark shades (low EV numbers). So which ones to expose for, if the scene covers five stops of opposing tonal values? In a scenario like that you might want to average them out. If the highest EV numbers in the scenes would require using an aperture of f16 and the lowest f4, you might want to consider choosing something in between, like f8 and let the film’s exposure latitude (assuming that you’re shooting film, of course) take care of the rest.

The popular phrase “f8 and be there“ is derived from this thinking as it allows you to get away with some very tricky lighting situations with such a simple and bullet proof idea.

One other good rule of thumb is to overexpose something like one and a half stops, if you’re shooting a backlit subject, in order to avoid silhouetted figure.

Also, when in doubt, lean rather towards overexposure than underexposure (assuming, again, that you’re shooting film) or bracket your shots. Ideally you’d of course want to expose correctly, but if it’s hard to judge, I’d always choose the setting that let’s in more light.

Applying some basic knowhow of exposure to a chart like this will honestly get you much further you’d think and it is really satisfying to be able to make good exposures with just a handful of simple settings.