Most of us have heard of the Sunny 16 rule by where the rule of thumb for “proper” exposure on a sunny day would be setting your aperture to f/16 and your shutter speed to 1 / x, where X = your ISO setting.  Basically, at f/16 and shooting at ISO 100, we would set our shutter speed to 1/100 and you’d be set (1/200 at ISO 200, etc).  Of course there are other variables to take into consideration depending on your desired outcome or subject, but it gets you close enough.  Well, after some trial and error (emphasis on the latter) I came to realize that when shooting the moon, I was having a very hard time properly exposing it.  Wanting to eliminate as much noise as possible, I was shooting at lower ISOs and after some more trial I found that I was coming in at about f/5.6- f/8 when spot metering and compensating for the extra brightness (I figured I should account for about 2 full stops over midtone) with the same one over rule as the Sunny 16…  This got me wondering if there was in fact a night shooters rule of thumb, and there in fact is…

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