So, I had the privilege of taking a closer look at Candace Owens while she was making the rounds defending her bosses at the Daily Wire.

Now, before we dive into this, we wanted to say that Candace Owens is a gorgeous black girl (and yes, we did just say ‘girl’ – cause we love girls and we believe this word can be used interchangeably with the words ‘female’, ‘woman’ ‘chick’ etc.)

So regardless of whether she is light skinned or dark skinned (we don’t care), she is gorgeous. We are not fans of her republicrat leanings and we don’t always agree with her dissertations (like most recently she said that there are some justifications to divorce — we strongly condemn this with the words of Christ himself who didn’t really give an out except for adultery and then too it was not required, but only a concession). So, we’re not saying that we are fans of Candace Owens. What we are saying is that we are happy she is out representing the vast diversity within black culture. All too often we see people try to paint black culture into a corner by assuming the culture is homogenous. There is no race that is homogenous. All races of people have diversity within the broader cultures within the races. And Candace Owens does a great job in representing the diversity in critical thought and taking the bold counter positions that place her at the center of the broader culture wars.

So, we took a look at a picture of Candace from her own podcast out on Youtube.

And then we took a look at Candace Owens on an episode of Timcast

So, as you can see from the thumbnail of her podcast, she is light skinned. Oh no, but wait, look at the thumbnail from her appearance on Timcast. She’s dark! But wait, is Candace closer in her shade to Wesley Snipes or is she closer in shade to Halle Berry? Does it even matter?

We’re picking on Candace today because we need to discuss photography and videography of beautiful black men and black women vis-a-vis white men and white women. The reason you see a difference in Candace Owens’ skin color above is because the cameras in her podcast were calibrated to the tone of her skin while we believe the cameras in her appearance on Timcast were calibrated to Tim Pool’s skin tone. And that’s something we should pay attention to because cameras are not as versatile as the human eye. They cannot truthfully represent the true skin tone of a dark skinned (or dark tanned) man or woman when the man or woman are being filmed/photographed standing near a lighter skinned man or woman. Now, it is my opinion that Candace Owens’ true skin tone is probably somewhere in the middle. The thumbnail they used for her podcast is clearly brightened and somewhat washed out which makes her skin tone look lighter than her natural skin tone. However, in the Timcast episode, the thumbnail appears darker than her natural skin tone because those cameras were never calibrated for Candace — they were calibrated to the predominant men and women that appear on that show.

Back in film school, we learned how to calibrate our cameras using a gray card. That’s because the camera’s iris clamps down when it sees a white background, but it tends to open up if it is shooting a dark background. However, if you compose a shot with a light and a dark image, side-by-side, you will generally have the camera’s iris clamp down because of the lighter skin tone in the photo, which in turn makes the darker toned person appear darker than usual. And that’s not to say there is anything wrong with our beautiful dark skinned brothers and sisters. Just saying that our cameras need to be made more versatile to be true to the original skin tone.

Nowadays, I don’t think people calibrate their cameras the way we used to before the digital revolution. I see a lot of people of color who either appear darker or lighter than their natural shade/tone. And I think that the camera manufacturers need to take another look at their cameras and see if something can be done to better represent the true skin tones of all races (not just black, but everyone) so that we get better looking images and images that represent the subject’s true skin tone. I’ve seen some images of white men and women where their skin tone looks like it has a blue tint.