I've never heard of a white balance card until now, nor knew that there were cameras that required such a device.
All digital cameras set to Auto 'guess' the colour balance of the shot they take, to a greater or lesser degree of success, unless manually instructed otherwise.
The camera can't 'see' colour; it assumes light's reflected equally from all surfaces, which would result in the average light intensity being a specific shade of grey. The camera takes the average brightness of the shot - remember that its sensors measure light
intensity - sets this as the grey reference colour and calculates the remaining colours in relation to it. Unfortunately, problems occur when there're few colours in the shot.
Take the classic (extreme) examples of a hill covered in snow and a volcano with black rock. Because these scenes have almost no variation in brightness from there being predominantly only one colour everywhere, the average brightness is the same as the actual brightness. Remembering that the camera assumes the average value is a shade of grey, the snow and rock are shown not as white and black respectively, but grey!
This is where the white balance card comes into play. By taking a shot of the card in the same light as the shots you're really interested in, when you download the photos you can tell the computer "the grey of the card in the photo (in whatever colour the camera has made it appear) is the same as your reference grey. Now map all colours in the photos to that".
I guess this helps to explain the high quality of your photos. That and the subject matter itself.
The second sentence is the correct one.
Actually I own only a prosumer digital camera at present. It has many of the features found on an SLR but cannot realistically compete. That's why I suspect I'll be buying a really good digital SLR in the near future.
I couldn't believe it. Honestly, I'm still not sure if I do...
Yeah, me too. If it truly is our brain fooling us, and I'm sure it is, then it boggles the mind.
