Sunny 16 :)

The other day, while out "shooting", I wanted to take a shot of a subject in the open shade of a large bush. I was using a totally manual camera (a Minolta AL RF, with Fuji Superia Extra, 400 ISO) and felt "too lazy" to do the required metering with my hand-held meter, so -on a whim- I just used the sunny 16 rule and opened up one stop for the open shade and took the shot. Guess what: the result was absolutely perfect (IMO, of course). the negative was indistinguishable from the others on the roll (using a hand-held meter).

What a liberating feeling it gave me! Like flying.

Shooting infra-red has made it clear why the shutter speeds are as they are on my KX. I hadn't previously realised that each click of the dial equates to a stop until I found that in order to apply the required seven stops of compensation for the IR filter I had to turn the shutter speed down seven notches...

I have a Sunny 16 card and keep meaning to try to memorise it, just so I know whether the metering is being vaguely sensible.