The Bias isn't in You; it's in the Camera
Willva Iriana Alberto ·
Every shade deserves the right light.
Introduction
My name is Willva Iriana Alberto, and I am a recent graduate in Digital Marketing from Ravensbourne University London. My final project, which received a First-Class grade, was focused on investigating the inefficiency of cameras when capturing people with darker skin tones and exploring the solutions emerging within cutting-edge technology.
I always found myself questioning: why do cameras still struggle with skin tones? In this article I will summarize some of what I found and will give you a brief insight on how this issue, that has been present for many years, could possibly now be solved through my idea.
The Problem
So where does this come from? Through my research, I found an article written by Lorna Roth, a professor at Concordia University for communications studies in 2009, called Looking at Shirley, the Ultimate Norm: Colour Balance, Image Technologies, and Cognitive Equity; that confirmed to me that cameras were never really built with darker skin in mind in the first place.
Roth explains that when film cameras were first developed, Kodak calibrated them using what were called "Shirley cards," basically reference photos of white-skinned women that became the industry standard for exposure and colour. That means the entire foundation of photography technology was built around lighter skin, and darker-skinned people were left underexposed and misrepresented from the very beginning, not because of a mistake, but because it just wasn't considered. And honestly, it took until 1995 for Kodak to even introduce a multi-racial reference card, so this wasn't a quick fix, it took decades.
What's even more frustrating is that this isn't just an old, outdated problem. Joy Buolamwini is a Canadian American woman who did a Gender Shades project in 2018 where she found that even now, with all the technology we have, facial recognition and imaging systems still perform worse for darker-skinned people, especially darker-skinned women, who had the highest error rates out of everyone tested. So, all this technology has moved forward, but somehow this specific issue hasn't really been fixed, which tells me that inclusivity was never really built in as a priority, it's always been an afterthought.
Why It Matters
If you have ever felt like you had to retake pictures more than once because your skin tone felt altered or you simply weren't seen in a picture, you know it's extremely upsetting. To me, this isn't just a technical flaw I found in some research paper, it's something I've lived. Growing up as a Black girl in a European city where most people around me weren't of colour, I know exactly what it feels like to look at a picture of yourself and feel like the camera just didn't see you properly, like you were somehow left out of your own photo. I genuinely hated having my picture taken as a kid, because I was always the student the teacher or photographer had to change the settings for, and it would take longer with me, which left me feeling extremely uncomfortable, like I was the problem. On top of that, in group pictures, I would barely appear properly. That's heartbreaking to me, because those are memories you want to keep forever, but because the technology simply wasn't advanced enough for people like me yet, I just had to accept it, and that's frustrating. My research wasn't shocking to me; it simply confirmed something I had already felt for years.
And I'm not the only one; through conversations with people around me, I found that being photographed or recorded can trigger real self-consciousness across all kinds of people, from students presenting in class to entrepreneurs trying to build a personal brand online, and a big part of that anxiety comes down to the fear that the camera simply won't represent them accurately or favourably. I think it stops being just my experience and becomes a much bigger issue, because if facial recognition and imaging systems are still misreading darker-skinned faces at significantly higher error rates, that's not just about a bad selfie, that's bias built into technology that's increasingly used in security, hiring, healthcare, and everyday life.
It's worth noting that companies like Google and Apple have started adjusting in this direction, which only proves this was always a real problem worth solving, but in the camera market specifically, it's barely been addressed at all. That gap, between how normalised this issue is and how little has been done about it, is exactly why I felt this couldn't just be a research topic for me, it had to become something I tried to find a way to solve.
Solutions
So, what could fix this? Big tech has already proven it's solvable. Google's Real Tone, built into devices like the Pixel 6 Pro, uses the Monk Skin Tone Scale, developed with Harvard sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk, to better capture darker skin tones, and it outperformed rival cameras in testing. Apple has made similar moves.
So, the technology exists, it just hasn't reached the camera market yet, and that's where my brand comes in, named AuraCam, with the tagline of "confidence in every shot". It's supposed to be a camera that dynamically calibrates exposure, white balance, and colour based on the actual skin tones in frame, in real time. It's not a filter, it's the camera finally seeing everyone accurately. I chose to add AI features like automatic lighting correction, background cleanup, and real-time framing to remove the technical excuses that make people, especially Gen Z creators, anxious on camera.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, this project was never just about building a camera concept, it was about proving a point I've felt my whole life: the bias was never in me, it was in the technology. Confidence shouldn't depend on your skin tone, and if the industry's biggest names can already show this is fixable, then there's no excuse for it to stay this way, in phones or in cameras. That's the standard my fictitious brand was meant to meet. I hope sincerely that anyone who felt affected in any way shape or form, reading this knows that this issue has a solution and I have it as my mission to help make it become real.