Welllllllllllllll it depends .......................

It depends on what type of photography I am doing.

Just recently I have been shooting mainly butterflies and flowers with a macro lens.  One of the biggest problems of shooting reference type shots of butterflies, besides finding them, for me has been colour.  Once you find your specimen there is no chance of using grey or white cards and flapping about trying to perfect the colour temperature, you have to be ready and get on with the shot before the thing flies off making rude gestures at you!  You have enough to think about getting the exposure, framing and background right and hoping the butterfly or camera doesn't move 'cos all you get then is an impressionist representation of fuzzy colours.

I was shooting in Auto WB Jpegs and that wasn't turning out too well. So I switched to RAW simply for the convenience of altering WB in processing. This is better, but still not good, it leaves me with deciding what the colour was, if I can remember, I might get it somewhere near.  For top quality shots it leaves me little alternative but to shoot a white card at the beginning and hope the light doesn't change too much while I am out. This then leaves me with smaller corrections to do to my RAW file and a better chance of being more accurate.  With this type of shot, in my experience with this camera, Auto WB is not very effective. I am not surprised by that because I am filling the frame with something that is often brightly coloured varying between cool blues and hot reds and oranges with just a smaller outer part of the image which can also vary a lot. Sometimes the background is green foliage, sometimes brown etc etc etc or there could be a flower thrown in there too just to add to the confusion. So there it is for my best shots of this type, a white card.

However that doesn't mean that I am always taking my best shots. If I am going out for a walk around the local nature reserve I take the camera and put it on auto WB and make the best of what I can when I get back.

The same goes for most of my photography, I make a judgement of what is important to me in this type of shot. If I am making a reference shot then colour could be very important and I would spend a lot of time making sure it was spot on.   

Most of my shots are not reference shots though. They are my interpretation of how I want it to be. I am making a pretty picture to hang on the wall, or an image with something to say in which case accurate true colour representation is often way way down on the list of priorities. I'll shoot in auto WB then because I know that I will be processing the image to make it look how I want it to look. An example: I recently posted an image of a wild carrot flower, I think in US you call them Queen Anne's Lace.  That image was never intended to be a reference shot, it was taken to make a large picture that will be framed and hung. The flowers have a tinge of pink in them, but I decided that for my image I wanted it to have much more than a tinge of pink, I used selective colour control in PS to make the image what I wanted it to be.  No point in shooting accurate colour there.  If I were to shoot a landscape shot, I wouldn't worry about white balance I would shoot on auto. I would be going to make the image what I want it to be anyway.  My most viewed image has a parchment coloured sky, I don't ever recollect seeing one in real life !

In conclusion it depends ...........

For reference shots or if someone was paying me to get the colours right (eg advertising) I will use custom white balance.

For general photography I'll use Auto WB, unless it is obvious there will be a problem caused by the type of composition the shot is.

For portraits and people I'll use Auto WB, modern cameras seem very good at getting these right and I may add a bit in PS if I think it looks better that way.

For art work I'll use anything - Auto to deliberately choosing the wrong WB to get the shot I want.

 

  

 

And every one said, 'If we only live,
We too will go to sea in a Sieve,---
To the hills of the Chankly Bore!'
Far and few, far and few, Are the lands where the Jumblies live;
Their heads are green, and their hands are blue, And they went to sea in a Sieve.

Edward Lear
http://www.nonsenselit.org/Lear/ns/jumblies.html