Dmitri
54 supporters
Sunny 16 calculator.

Sunny 16 calculator.

Jan 12, 2022

This year, I'd like to kick off a series of short posts about the latest projects on Analog.Cafe. This time it's an app.

I love the simplicity of full auto-exposure, but sometimes I prefer to guess my light using the Sunny 16 rule. Mistakes are easy to make but over time I found that my guesses are almost as good as the light meters that the cameras come with. And I certainly appreciate having full control over my settings and not having to bother with a completely separate process for measuring the light.

Still, unless I'm shooting at 𝒇16 on a sunny day, there could be a bit of mental math involved and it's easy to forget what the scene should look like at certain exposures. So I built a tool to solve that problem.

It was a fun design challenge though it required a lot more code than I anticipated. There is plenty of logic there (over 700 lines of code) to deal with priorities, locking, and prevention from going out of bounds. But the most exciting part was selecting photographs to represent each lighting condition.

Please feel free to try Sunny 16 Calculator here and let me know what you think.

If there's enough interest, I will add more features, like:

  • A few popular 1/3 ISO speeds, like 125 and 160. I have an idea to have the 1/3 stops round up or down depending on the kind of film you're shooting — as it's usually safer to over-expose negative and under-expose slides.

  • Ability to memorize your settings. Perhaps even let you keep a tally of your various films.

  • Ability to switch from shutter priority to aperture priority. Or a smarter priority switcher that would keep your aperture constant if you switch your ISO.

  • A set of scenes from another environment (I'm thinking street photography).

  • Smart notifications to help you understand why certain settings were chosen better.

  • Fancy animations.

  • Offline mode.


A lot could still be done to make this tool even better.

Enjoy this post?

Buy Dmitri a coffee

More from Dmitri