White Balance Issues

[Robin]

Hi,
Following advice from an Andy Rouse book I have always left my camera on Auto White Balance. Yesterday I took a couple of photos of a moth and was suprised to see the difference the background made to the colour of the moth (see first composite image). The photos were taken exactly 40 seconds apart and nothing was changed except for the background.
I played around with the photos in Lightroom trying to get the moths to look the same. It was only when I changed the White Balance to "Daylight" on them both that they started to look similar (second composite). There was not much change to the bark background, but a big change to the leaf colour.
So, the questions are:
What White Balance settings do you all use?
Do you leave your camera on the same setting or do you change it to suit the weather conditions?
Do you know if the metering has any effect on White balance? (my camera is on Evaluative Metering)
I would be very interested to hear your comments. Now it looks as though I will have to go back and alter all my photos!!
Thanks,
Robin

[JKT]

I never use AWB. If I don't use flash, the camera is on daylight and otherwise on flash. In some special cases - especially with my own flash diffusors - I use manual WB. It really doesn't matter as I always shoot RAW+JPG.

[Dave McCormick]

I never use AWB much myself. I noticed that with a flash, the metering affects the AWB. I use AWB sometimes if I want to get a shot fast without having time to tweak settings. The if colour seems a little like its not right, I change the hue and colour tempreture on computer until I get it looking as natural as I can.

I am going to start shooting in RAW+JPG in future as I got the hang of using my camera properly.

[Pete Eeles]

Following advice from an Andy Rouse book I have always left my camera on Auto White Balance.

Me too - based on the same advice! I think Andy's advice is only relevant if you shoot RAW - the point being that you can easily change this using software without losing any quality at all and so why faff around with white balance in the field when you can just set it to "Auto" and adjust it later.

But I am taken aback by the difference!

Cheers,

- Pete

[Robin]

Thanks for the responses.

I do shoot RAW (but not RAW+jpeg as that seems a waste of memory card space). And I do know that there is much more flexibility without quality loss if you shoot RAW. The problem is, until I had taken these two shots I had no idea of the effect that the surroundings could have on the colour of the object I was photographing.
So, if I spend a day in the field taking a couple of hundred shots how do I know which ones need editing to get exactly the right colours? And how can I determine what the correct colours should be? AND, under what circumstances will the difference be significant enough to make editing necessary (i.e. like the two photos above)?
This has really suprised me and I have a lot more questions in my head, but I'll rest there for now.
Thanks,
Robin

[eccles]

There isn't really a 'correct' colour because lighting will affect the colour of the subject. A cloud obscuring the sun in an otherwise blue sky will really cool the colour temperature because of the light from the blue sky, a sunset will produce warmer colours, and so on. Sensors aren't exactly neutral either. Like others here, I shoot raw with AWB and tweak colour temperature and tint at the PC if necessary.