Anyone who's ever owned a camera knows that the only thing a flash mounted on the camera and pointing at the subject is good for is fill lighting when the subject is in shadow. Then start putting in lights that you control. Straight-on lights look pretty crummy. Color me unique. Let's see if we can't move your world from the dull majority to the VRML elite.
Fog has a color field.
Make your objects glow in the dark. But tastefully applied emissiveColor is just the thing to make objects stand out in a scene. Figure 2 shows the same aircraft after some tweaking. While the color field in the IndexedFaceSet was worse than useless in the aircraft, it comes into its glory in the fish in Figure 3, adapted from Charles Eubanks's model at the VRML Repository. Per-vertex coloring is probably too difficult to do by hand, except for very simple objects or parts of objects, but when you want a nice color gradient, nothing else does it better.