WB • a Rule or a Choice? — added version

[Nikkor Shooter]

I think my point was missed.

Very sorry, Charlie, English is not my language and any
point missing was missed by me for sure.

which does not show the "subject's true colours", as you put it.

True colours are good but they don't reflect additional in-
formation like time of day, moods of the weather etc!

Cheers Charlie!

[pluton]

Same with snow scenes, by the way. Shadows on sunlit snow landscapes are intensively blue.

Birna, in the days of film, did you ever use the Skylight 1A filter to reduce the blue shadows in the vast Nordic world of snow scenes?
The few times I got to shoot sunlit snow scenes on film (typically Kodachrome 64, Ektachrome 64) the blue shadows were, of course, in evidence.  I found that the once-ubiquitous Skylight 1A filter would substantially reduce the blueness of the shadows in those scenes...on film.
Much later I tried a 1A filter on digital, and it seemed to do nothing against the blueness of the shadows.

[Birna Rørslett]

Never used a skylight filter. No fan of the Kodak films either -- their colours were poor and not to my taste.

[Ann]

I prefer the third option.

I shot Kodak colour negative film 98% of the time but always had the advantage of being able to process and print my own film which made it possible to correct the colours during the printing so I seldom needed to use filters over the camera's lens except for a reflection-cutting polarizer. (I somehow managed to talk the Separators for the British publications into working from my colour prints and they did manage to match my colours remarkably well — despite their preliminary misgivings!)

Now we can do selected masking and colour correction digitally which cuts down the need for lens-filtering even further.