Today's Homework

I have waited and waited until the last minute for this week's homework. Mostly it isn't my fault - we've had nothing but clouds this week and these shots needed to be done on a tabletop in window light. The only sunny day was, well, Saturday when we went to Disney. Not exactly going to do a technical camera exercise amid the swarms of people there. Nope.
So, today it was.
I worked with so many ideas for these tone-on-tone tabletops and, frankly, didn't get very impressive results. I have concluded that the camera I am using is just a really good one (I'm using my sister-in-law's nice camera for assignments this semester...). Sometimes I got a result using a gray card and sometimes, the exposure looked exactly the same. The camera seems to be automatically adjusting the white balance even when I've held the shutter halfway down after zeroing in on the gray card.
Oh well.
I think I'll ask about it tonight in class.
Here is one set of pictures where you can see the difference, though, the lighter one being before the gray card, the darker one being after:



They're not my favorite shots of this typewriter, though. He is very photogenic, it turns out. He deserves a post of his own and will have his day, I suspect. Nonetheless, it demonstrates that I was doing this right at some point. The rest of the before-and-afters turned out with little difference between the shots. Here are a few of my favorite pairs, though:
















Overall, I'm least happy with the white ones, though after consulting the camera's manual, I think I understand how to fix the problems and get a good white color. I just don't have time to set back up and do it before class. I think it's in setting a custom white balance based on your gray card. It's a little more complicated of a fix. Whatever.