White Balance

I've heard a lot about setting your own white balance using a "gray card". With a little bit of research I found that for digital cameras you want to use an 18% gray card and for film cameras you want to use 12% gray card. Looking online, these start around $20 and go up from there. So in an experiment I created a solid 18% gray picture and printed it on a 3x5 card and took the following series of photos.

This is the programed tungsten white balance.

This is the auto white balance.

This is the manual white balance using the homemade 3x5 card.

So I will do a little more experimenting with darker and lighter cards to see what they will do as well, but I think these photos speak for themselves. I will continue to use the card.