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» In case you missed it: How We Take Food Photos I: Tools and Equipment

Several people have mentioned about the ‘lighting’ in our photos, and even so much to say as we have ‘great’ lighting. Well, thank you, this is undeserved. Being home cooks and mostly self-taught, we’re absolutely flattered. The thing is, we don’t use any kind of special lighting (yet). The ‘lighting’ in our photos is the product of:

• setting the white balance before taking photos,
• using exposure compensation if needed,
• and post-processing (color balance and levels) with Photoshop.

Today’s all about the white balance. For the average food photography enthusiast/home cook/”food pornista”, you can always take photos using the white balance set to Auto. However, based on experience, if you get most things right when taking the photo — the colors with the white balance, exposure, focus/sharpness, composition, etc. — you’ll be spending less time with post processing. And that’s a great thing! More time to enjoy your food and other things.

Today’s tools:

• a gray card with one side gray and the other I have no idea what they are for, and
• packets of Active Dry Yeast [Am I too suggestive that you make dough this weekend?]

When I got the gray card last December, believe it or not, I’ve never held or heard of it prior to that. Shameful, but we all start somewhere. The only instructions I’ve had were from the magazine where it came from. This is what we do to manually set the white balance:

1. Hold the gray card where you would have the photo taken, as shown above.
2. With your camera white balance setting selected for pre-set (or manual) and the camera ready to take the measurement [read the manual for this], point your lens at the card and make sure it occupies the whole frame. Take the reading/shot. Note: I’ve read that you do not have to have to gray fill the entire frame. Our digital point-and-shoot only has a small window for the manual white balance, so it’s hard not to fill it.
3. The camera won’t take a picture of the card, only make a reading.
4. That’s it. Take a test show and see how it looks like. ** The angle of the card matters. ** If it’s reflecting light (e.g. there’s a bright light behind you), you might get an incorrect reading.

I took photos using both the DSLR (Nikon D80) and digital point-and-shoot (Nikon Coolpix 5200) cameras in 3 different white balance settings. The photos below are only edited for the size and sharpness, no color balance or levels touched whatsoever, so you’ll see the differences in their ”original” form. Each camera had the same exposure for each shot as well.

White Balance on the Nikon D80
(The “daytime” was actually the “Direct Sunlight” setting):

White Balance on the Nikon Coolpix 5200:

See the differences?

So now you might be asking, and it’s been bugging you since I started talking about the gray card — Uh, why are we using a GRAY card for WHITE balance?

It does sound odd, doesn’t it? I’ve wondered about this myself, and so has one of you who asked about using white cards. I did a bit of research and found this very useful information that’s easily explained:

The concept goes something like this: if you point the camera at something that is supposed to be a known color, the camera can compare what it actually sees to what it knows it is supposed to be seeing, and determine what it needs to do to compensate. Since any shift of color is most noticeable when starting with a neutral hue, that’s what is traditionally used for this task. If we could define and accurately manufacture a standard shade of any other color though, we could all agree to use “red balance” or perhaps “blue balance,” but for a variety of reasons the world has standardized on “white balance.”

In practice though, white itself isn’t generally your best bet since any color sufficiently overexposed will yield pure white. It isn’t really the brightness we are interested in measuring anyway but rather the color. For this reason, many photographers make use of a standard gray card instead. When you think about it, it makes perfect sense. It has a nice, medium tone and a neutral hue, and photographers frequently have one anyway for metering. If you point a camera at a gray card and shoot fully on auto exposure, you will get a medium toned result. We know how bright the picture will be, so the only thing in question is what color it will be. Since the gray card actually has a neutral hue, any variation from neutral that the camera records must have come from the color of the light shining on it. To do this, it is important that the frame be completely filled with the color we are measuring to prevent reflections from other objects influencing it.

[Source: Bob Johnson of EarthBound Light. Go visit his site. It's a great photography resource.]