I still have no flash though also because that is going to cost me another few hundred dollars for one.
I also mostly shoot in AF and I use the auto setting with options that allow quick changes to the aperture and shutter speed. I also use landscape mode for more proper blue and green balances.
This year I did not use my polarizer once, I stopped using it because of too many unbalanced skies that I could not correct and then I just never put it on, turned out to be dead weight.
the flash I use for those fill situations is the small thing built into the camera. You can do that with anything that works on a Canon. I don't do anything fancy with the flash - just pop it open, tell the camera nothing new. If the resulting image looks too bright and there's a chance for a second shot, i drop the flash by half a stop or so. If I was not hiking, I'd also try a diffuser.
re white balance - when you shoot raw, none of that really matters. It's a post processing decision. I leave it on auto, but only as a starting point. About half the images I have online needed white balance tweaking in Camera Raw. If you want to be certain you know what was "white" at the exact time of each image taken, you'd have to carry one of these
white balance calibrators along and re-measure every single time you shoot, as the light keeps changing constantly over the course of a day. I just ballpark it when looking at the images next to each other.
I think a lot of my "not so blue" blue skies may be a result of my rather low-budget polarizer (it also doubled as lens cap), but I don't lose much sleep over it - this is digital, so by design it's going to be challenged in return for the convenience (1500 images this summer, that is about 50 rolls of slide film on three tiny plastic cards - well worth a little drop in quality, not even counting the $$$ for the film and processing saved). I keep telling myself I gotta take the film body back up there, but I think that train has left the station and it's digital from here on.
