A Grey Card and a Reader

Ed got me a grey card for Christmas. Isn’t it neat?Warning: This next paragraph is for those interested in photography. 

IT IS NEAT!  A photographer uses a grey card to fix white balance. Basically, since the camera isn’t as smart as our brains, it has a hard time adjusting white balance in different lighting situations. This is why sometimes your indoor pictures look orange or sometimes blue…depending on the lighting. Usually you can set white balance on your camera, but often it still isn’t quite right. However, grey card is a color that is a true and accurate representation of the physical qualities of the light illuminating the card. The photographer takes a picture of the grey card right before taking a picture in a certain lighting situation. Then, in post-production, on the computer, you use the photo of the grey card to set the white balance in the rest of the pictures in that setting. It’s super easy – two clicks of the mouse on the right spots and it’s done. I don’t fully understand it, but I do know that it makes it easier to adjust white balance for two reasons.

1. I don’t have to trust my eyes to get the right color.

And 2. I don’t have to trust my monitor (since monitors can have different color tones).

Here is the picture I took right after the grey card photo and then adjusted according to the grey card reading.To me, it’s a little blue-toned. Grey cards cause pictures to look like daylight and of course this scene didn’t really look like daylight to my eyes when I took the picture. It was at night, with minimal interior lighting.

So, with this next picture, I used the grey card reading and then bumped it up a tad to look more like the scene looks like in my mind.Either way, it looks much better than the actual photograph that my camera took. I’m happy and excited to learn to use it.

AND either way, you must notice what is happening *in* those pictures! Becca is READING! She has begun to really catch on to sounding out words AND sight words, and over Christmas break she has taken on the challenge of reading that entire book on her own. She has just about accomplished that task. It is called “The Biggest, Best Snowman” and you should definitely read it. Becca can.