My goal for this roll of Kodacolor 100 was to practice using the Sunny 16 rule, a method for figuring out aperture and shutter speed settings using just your eyes and brain. For context, usually when I shoot with the M3, since it doesn’t have a built-in light meter, I typically pull out myLightMeter Pro on my phone to meter the scene, then fumble putting my phone away while I click the lens and shutter to the right settings.
Before, I’d heard the the Sunny 16 rule described as “one divided by your film speed” and the moment I heard there was division involved, my brain turned off. Recently, I had a moment where I remembered “yes, we can do hard things!” and decided I would actually take some time focus on trying to learn this rule. By actually reading the Wikipedia page, I realized that it was much simpler than I feared, and didn’t require doing division on the fly.
The part I stuck with was “just memorize ƒ/16 and 1/100s for ISO 100 film”. From there, I know I can stop the aperture one step wider and go one step faster on the shutter (such as to ƒ/11 and to 1/250s for the same scene) to stay properly exposed.
The next part of learning this skill was trying to baseline what “direct sunny sun” is, and how many stops down from that to go in less-sunny settings (So for more overcast, start at ƒ/11 instead, and then even darker, down to ƒ/8, ƒ/5.6, and so on.
For a lot of these photos, I was 100% meter-free! However, for a few shots, I’d make a guess and gut-check it with my lightmeter app (and correct as needed). Unfortunately, I didn’t write down which photos were which! Overall, I am feeling encouraged by this exercise and will keep practicing with the Sunny 16 rule in the future!
Selfie with a wild lens flare
I have a billion photos of this view on my phone, it was nice to get one on film too!
I had a chance to visit the USCG’s Vessel Traffic facilities on Treasure Island.
Maybe a tad underexposed
On my way home, I saw a crowd of skateboarders gathering (my neighborhood is not usually a big skateboarding spot). When I got closer, I could see the group was all watching one of their friends try to skate a big jump off of a garage across the street. I ran home around the corner to grab my 135mm lens so I could shoot from across the street.
The shot I imagined in my head was the skater mid-air with some sky in the background, but that wasn’t the layout I had without getting closer than I was comfortable. I was just glad to be able to capture him mid-air, and mostly in focus!
I brought my camera along on a trip to Costco with Ed.
Also maybe a tad underexposed
