I always shoot in RAW, but when I'm taking a shot in incandescent light, I manually set the white balance to Tungsten. Generally, I find it to be decent with reguard to the look of a shot. I can always tweak it later from a WhiBal test shot anyway.
I don't use UV filters. I've seen threads on fredmiranda where some guy was complaining about his new $1600 70-200VR lens giving awful images. After three pages of tests and comments, somebody asked if he was using any sort of filter on the lens. Took the $20 filter off, and suddenly the lens was perfect. I refuse to pay such large amounts of money for a lens, only to put a $20 piece of glass in front of it. I used to be high-quality filters for all my lenses, but realized life is short and things break, but I'd rather have a better image than whine about cleaning my glass once a month. I do like to use a filter whenever I'm on the beach shooting though, salty wind can get really nasty.
Your other thread inspired me to break out my own 35mm f/1.4 AIS lens the other night. I threw it on the mount and hopefully will get to use it within the next week or two. I really never gave it much of a chance, but now that I have full metering use with it (yay D2x!) I will give it a shot. I love that it's even closer to the ~50mm FOV too. I looked up my serial number on that webpage and found out that I have the f/16 9-blade version. I also dug up an old e-mail from the ebay auction, and found that I paid $355 for it when I got it. I knew that $460 seemed a little pricey to me...
Hope your lens gets there safe and soon!
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there was no tomorrows
we'd packed away our sorrows
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