Shot with a T5, and saved as RAW. Rokinon 14mm T3.1
Processed by Adobe LR6, because DPP does not process third party lenses.
The more photos you take, the better you will become.
@TCampbellwrote:One of the advantages of an incident light meter over a reflected meter is that the incident meter only reads the light "falling" on the sensor. It doesn't care what you are trying to shoot. Whereas a reflected meter is all about reading the light reflecting off your metering subject.
This does a nice job of clearing up some of the basic mysteries of reading a histogram and light metering. But I wonder if it might be worth making a small change to your description of the differences between reflective and incident metering.
Would it be more correct to say "that the incident meter only reads the light falling on the meter"? The way it's written in your reply might lead somebody to believe that you're referring to the camera's image sensor.
Too pedantic? 
@BurnUnitwrote:
@TCampbellwrote:One of the advantages of an incident light meter over a reflected meter is that the incident meter only reads the light "falling" on the sensor. It doesn't care what you are trying to shoot. Whereas a reflected meter is all about reading the light reflecting off your metering subject.
This does a nice job of clearing up some of the basic mysteries of reading a histogram and light metering. But I wonder if it might be worth making a small change to your description of the differences between reflective and incident metering.
Would it be more correct to say "that the incident meter only reads the light falling on the meter"? The way it's written in your reply might lead somebody to believe that you're referring to the camera's image sensor.
Too pedantic?
That's certainly a fair statement. My term about the incident meter measuring the light falling on the sensor (of the incident meter... not the camera sensor). To rephrase that it's measureing the light landing on the incident meter would prevent confusion.
There are some nuances as well. (Some light meters have amazing capabilities ... they can read multiple data-points and provide the best exposure as a mean of all the sampled data-points; they can tell you when a scene will exceed your camera's dynamic range; they can meter flash; they can calculate "flash contribution" as a percentage of light relative to the ambient light; many also have integrated reflected meters as well as incident meters; etc.)
Reflected metering (some hand-held light meters that can be used for incident metering, also include a reflected sensor. If I'm shooting a landscape and want to know what the meter reading is on some snow-capped mountains in the background, it would be impractical to have to hike all the way up the mount to take a reading and then hike all the way back to my camera) refers to any light that first has to reflect off a subject before being picked up by the metering sensor.
When you use a Canon camera with "evaluative" metering mode (the default), the camera is sampling lots of points across the frame and trying to find the exposure that would best capture as many points as possible without over or under-exposure ... but it's willing to split the difference.
This is why, when shooting a tricky scene where there's a large part that is likely to clip (but isn't important), the camera wont know that. It can end up adjusting the exposure to try to re-claim some of the parts that are going to clip... and that can end up having an undersireable effect on the part of the scene you DID care about.
This is why the camera also has center or spot metering mode as well as "center-weighted" metering mode, etc. in combination with the AE-Lock feature. This allows you to meter the thing you care about, lock it, then re-compose and take the shot knowing that the camera will use the best exposure for your metered subject and ignore everything else.
