The Life-saving F/16 Rule for Landscape Photographers

For a lot of us, landscape photography is one of our favourite past-times. Being out with nature doing the hobby you love, really is something we enjoy.

It can get a little frustrating if we're not producing the standard of shots that we would like to however.

Luckily, there's a quick and easy rule that can save your daytime landscapes (or any other daytime shot for that matter), at least in terms of exposure and light.

It's called the f/16 Rule and is sometimes known as the Sunny 16 Rule.

It's basically a way of ensuring a reasonable shot under sunny conditions without recourse to a light meter.

The basic rule states to shoot at an apperture of f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/125 when shooting on ISO 100 film.

Or f/16 with a shutter speed of 1/ISO setting (or as close as your camera settings will allow)

For example, let's say you were shooting on 400 ISO film.

The formula would be f/16 and 1/400 speed.

With ISO 800, it would be f/16 and 1/800 speed.

Just in case that still doesn't make sense, try out these other links on the f/16 Rule:

The Sunny f/16 Rule
And on Wikipedia
And one more…

What We Recommend for Landscape Photography

Want to really hone down your landscape photography skills? Then these are the premium resources that will take you there if you put in the work to follow them.

Landscape Photography Guide – This is a detailed guide by Kent Dufault that will give you all of the basics of shooting landscapes. It covers setup, basic composition, lighting and gear. This is a great all-rounder guide.
The Landscape Magic Lightroom Toolkit – When you are ready to start post-production on your landscape photos, then this toolkit gives your specially developed Lightroom presets, brushes and filters that will make them pop. It also comes with a shooting guide and several landscape photo “recipes” so you can follow along.
Advanced Composition – The fact is that a great landscape requires great composition. If you want to take your landscape shots well beyond the rule of thirds, then this is the guide you will want to take very seriously.

About Author

Rob is the founder of Light Stalking. His love for photography pushed him into building this fantastic place, and you can get to know him better here.

8 Comments

Great tip!
I should try that 🙂

Nice tip but….

Surely at ISO 400 the shutter speed should be 1/500 (and 1/1000 for ISO 800)

Will be testing this 🙂

great tip. the shutter speeds and f stop coordination actually make a lot of sense.
F16 is the same f stop we used to study the hyperfocal distance in school a couple of weeks ago. but this article just put new light to why we were restricted to that number, specially with the 1/ISO concept. well done!

Tried this as soon as I read it, lol. It works well at 400, I will try it at 800 later. Thanks for the tip!

I learnt this “rule” ages ago in a course I did. And it has saved me a few times…
Thanks for sharing!

What if your camera can only go as low as f/8? Would lowering the equivalent shutter speed to half work?

Let’s say at f/8 at ISO 100, equivalent shutter speed would be 1/50?

Thanks for sharing BTW.

f/16 to f/8 is 2 stops apart(f16 to f11 to f8), so you would need to adjust your shutter accordingly, 1/100 to 1/400 or 1/500

thank you for the tip. I have problems figuring out what settings to use so this will be helpful to at least take the picture using the f16 rule and then experimenting with other settings.