set your shutter speed to match your ISO (film speed or digital camera set-
ting), and on a bright, sunny day, normally during late morning and early af-
ternoon, set your aperture to f/16 and you’ll get a great exposure. If the
clouds roll in, subtract at least one f/stop (e.g., open your lens to f/11).
There are a few exceptions: water, sand, and snow are natural reflectors
that will amplify the light, and you might find yourself stopping your lens
down to between f/16 and f/22. If your lens doesn’t allow you to go all the
way to f/22, then raise your shutter speed one step higher, which reduces the
light by 50 percent onto your image capture device or film plane.
Now, if a photographer was armed with a knowledge of the Sunny 16 Rule
and wanted to overpower the sun with flash, he would want to ensure that the
power pack or studio lighting kit was powerful enough to produce light as
strong or stronger than f/16 either by intensity of the light or by moving the
light closer to the subject—or both. Sometimes this also involves changing
the light modifier to prevent too much light loss. It’s not unusual for me to
go from a softbox to a beauty dish or just a 7-, 9-, or 12-inch reflector.
The effect from overpowering the sun simply means we’re going to intro-
duce enough light intensity from an artificial light source, like a studio flash
unit, onto the subject so that when we expose for the subject, the background
darkens.
There are times, however, when we can’t do this because we can’t get our
light source close enough to our subject and/or the power unit is just not
strong enough, as most power packs or portable studio flash units for this ef-
fect normally need to be at least 1000 (“true,” not “effective”) watt-seconds.
When this happens, the quickest solution is to have our subject stand in front
of a dark background, such as bushes or trees with dark green leaves, or dark
rocks. Basically we still expose for our subject and our background will be
overexposed, as our subject is usually illuminated with flash or some type of
light reflected upon them, not direct sunlight. This is especially true if your
subject is placed in an open-shade setting. The human eye will not normally
know that the background is overexposed, as we just see green leaves or dark
rocks, and the fact that dark areas absorb more light than lighter areas helps
in this scenario. On the other hand, if we are using the sea, sky, or a bright area
as our background and put our subject in an open-shade environment but
cannot overpower the sun, the background will wash out—and that’s not a
good thing.METERING AND EXPOSURE 111FACING PAGE—I captured Sheila during
the afternoon—not really the best
time to be doing photography out-
doors in the Virgin Islands. This
image was possible because I took
into account the Sunny 16 Rule and
placed Sheila underneath a white
awning near the pool. I also pur-
posely shot into a dark background
of foliage. This is a helpful trick if
you feel your sky will look washed
out; just ensure your background
has dark foliage. If the sun is hitting
the foliage, consider creating an
overexposed background—it will
only look brighter green, not overex-
posed. (CAMERA:Canon EOS 5D fitted
with a Canon 70–200mm f/2.8L IS
USM lens. SETTINGS: 135mm effective
focal length,^1 / 200 second shutter
speed, f/16, white balance at 6000K,
ISO 100)