gray card or white balance disc?

13 years 3 weeks ago #52267 by silverlining
Between a gray card and a white balance disc/cap which one has more accurate results? I do not have a gray card, so I can not test the theory.


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13 years 3 weeks ago #52269 by williams35
What is a gray card?


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13 years 3 weeks ago #52270 by silverlining
It's exactly what it is....it's an 18% gray card.


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13 years 3 weeks ago #52272 by williams35
Oh I see...why 18%?


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13 years 3 weeks ago #52273 by silverlining
Because the camera see's 18% gray...I have no idea why.


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13 years 3 weeks ago #52279 by DestinDave
18% gray is a number that Kodak came up with years ago.. don't know exactly how...

Let's say you are shooting in Full Auto mode and your metering mode is Center-weighted Average mode... A camera's light meter "looks" at the scene and determines an aperture/shutter speed to render an image with an "average" light reading of 18% gray. Not always accurate if 75% of the scene is bright sky and your wife has her back to the sky - you end up with a dark silhouette of your wife...

For a quick and fairly reliable reading, hold a gray card up in the same light as your subject, fill your viewfinder with the card, and get a meter reading and suggested aperture/shutter settings.. Use those setting for your normal shot and you should get a nice exposure.. In the example above though, your subject will be nicely exposed and the sky will likely be blown out.. it's not a perfect system.

Dave Speicher
I thought I wanted a career.. turns out I only wanted paychecks.
dlspeicher.zenfolio.com

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13 years 3 weeks ago #52307 by Screamin Scott
Either one will give you accurate results....

Scott Ditzel Photography

www.flickr.com/photos/screaminscott/

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13 years 3 weeks ago #52549 by Stealthy Ninja

Screamin Scott wrote: Either one will give you accurate results....

:agree:

They'll be so close you won't be able to tell.
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13 years 3 weeks ago #52627 by Graflex 4x5
It's another thing you can thank Adams and Kodak for. They worked closely together to come up with a universal exposure system called .... the Zone System. At first concept there was 12 zones, each 1 stop different then the one either side of each other. This represented exposures from the blackest blacks to the whitest of whites and mid point was .... yup an 18% gray or Zone 6.

The Zone System is now down to 10 zones, mostly due to the limitations of our eye and B&W print paper, but the 18% netural gray has become an industry standard for exposure.

FYI: a gray card is special. Not sure if it's the gray material, but it's non-reflective to both normal light and IR light. makeing it "netural".

No matter how fast I go, there's always someone slower in front of me.
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13 years 3 weeks ago #52746 by Happy-pixel

Stealthy Ninja wrote:

Screamin Scott wrote: Either one will give you accurate results....

:agree:

They'll be so close you won't be able to tell.


Yes but the white balance filters are easier aren't they?


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