Learning Goals
- Students will be able to use a gray card to improve their photos
- Students will understand how a gray card can help improve exposure and white balance
Cameras today are becoming more advanced all the time, but they're not perfect. We'll learn how an 18% Gray Card can help with our exposure and white balance.
First, we'll watch this video that shows how our camera can sometimes get things wrong (it sees the world as gray). Gray cards are not very expensive (just the gray card or a pack), but this article will show us how to make our own.
Exposure
Gray cards can help us get the right exposure for our subject. This is especially helpful in scenes with large amounts of black or white. The first part of this article will show us how to use our gray card for exposure. This video demonstrates how it can be used as well. We'll practice this in class.
Bryan Peterson Says (Understanding Exposure) ...
After you buy your gray card, you only need to use it once. These links explain how we can use the palm of our hand as a gray card.
White Balance
White balance determines the 'temperature' of our images (warm vs cool). Gray cards can be used to set a custom white balance in our camera while shooting or as a reference when editing/processing images. The second part of this article will show us how to use a gray card for white balance. When we look at shooting and editing in RAW, we may talk about using a gray card for editing. For now, we will focus on how to set a custom white balance while shooting. We'll practice this in class.
The Assignment
Practice using your gray card with this rubric.