[Tom Edgerton]

Mike--

You're intuitively a way better photographer than I, based on previous posts of yours. But when you think about it, it makes sense that the one thing that digital cameras can't do better than film is deal with mixed-temperature light. Any device that's going to average the predominant color temperature in a situation is still going to show whatever off-color light is lurking around. Our brains can compensate readily, but optical devices can't.

When I was an advertising art director, we used to jump through all kinds of hoops to either change the off-color light to whatever temp was predominating, block the off-color sources, or pick a film--daylight or tungsten--that would give us most of what we wanted, and then we would live with the rest.

While this may seem like a real pain, the beauty was that it really sensitized me to evaluating the temperature of different light sources as soon as we'd walk into a situation. Later, I actually began to use such disparities creatively for effect, such as your realizing that a little extra warmth was good for your red-headed subject--even though this seemed like a problem at the time.

Thanks for a useful post.

Best--TE