Stupidity and the lightmeter

[21-135 Apo All Good]

Actually, no. If you use the dome and take an incident light reading properly, you're measuring the light that's illuminating your subject -- not the light that's reflecting from your subject. Your reading therefore cannot be fooled by an atypically light or dark subject. That is in fact the main advantage of metering incident light.

Now, you might want to then make an artistic decision to deliberately expose your subject so that it's more or less exposed than it would render in the "normal" case, but that's a different matter entirely than having to compensate for a reflected meter trying to tell you to expose fresh snow so that it comes out neutral gray.

Very true! And so is the opposite: A black Labrador dog, or as Tony Corbell (friend of mine & lighting Guru) is always quoted, "A Light-Sucking Black Lab"! Seems the only way to get detail in the dog's coat is to side light it and overexpose it, or it too comes out muddy gray from underexposure. A reflected light meter reading of the "Light Sucking Dog" could yield a gross overexposure of the rest of the image since the meter is trying to turn pitch black into 18% gray!

dave