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In the studio, a handheld meter is the ultimate tool for controlling and shaping light. When doing environmental portraits, however, a meter like the Sekonic L-358 Flash Master is also an indispensable tool. In this type of photography, it’s all about getting the best exposure possible, and that just doesn’t happen with my in-camera metering system.

Now, I use these tools as part of my everyday shooting and have been doing so for years. I trust my meter to accurately tell me the amount of light falling on the subject, and I know that will give me the information I need. Let me tell you a quick story of an engagement shoot I did last spring where I let doubt creep in.

The couple getting married wanted to have some fun incorporating photos that included a location they frequented early during their courtship, part of which involved rowing on a lake near the bride's mom’s house. We decided to recreate this and take some shots of them on the lake in a rowboat, taking turns at rowing duty.

While it was a sunny day with bright blue skies, the water of the lake appeared as a fairly dark blue, and the distant tree-line also had dark shades of green and brown. The young lady was of course wearing a white top and her fiancé was wearing a black t-shirt, making for a scene with a fairly extreme tonal range. Because of the complete range from white to black, correct exposure was going to be critical to record the best shadow detail without blowing out the details of the woman's white blouse.

As the couple pushed off the dock and started rowing, I took a meter reading of the light falling around me. The beauty of this was that the sunlight falling on my subject, now 20 yards offshore, was exactly the same as the sunlight around me. I dialed in the readings with my camera set on manual and started shooting. I didn’t need to check exposure because I knew it would be perfect. But then . . .

I made the mistake of looking at a histogram from an image just captured. Because of the sunny skies I thought it seemed pushed too far to the left. I started to doubt my meter reading and think that something was wrong—even though I really should have known better. I decided to open up the exposure to lighten the image and push the histogram a bit more to the center. The images looked better on my camera’s LCD, but sanity eventually prevailed. I turned on my camera’s overexposure warning (often referred to as “blinkies”) and in the shots I just took, the young lady’s white blouse had completely blown out. I smacked myself, put the camera back to the settings my meter gave me, and stopped looking at the histogram. I continued shooting this way for the rest of the day and my shots were all well exposed.

So what happened? Since the scene in front of me had a dark lake with a dark tree-line, the skin tones and white blouse only made up a small amount of the overall scene. Because of this, the highlights barely registered on the camera’s histogram, making it look like I had underexposed the image. A camera’s metering system measures the light reflected back from a subject, and in this case it was completely fooled because of the large dark areas. Since a handheld meter measures the light falling on a subject rather the reflected light, it can’t be fooled by the color or tone of the subjects you are photographing. By measuring the incident light and trusting the reading—as long as you match the shutter speed, aperture, and ISO settings—you can be sure that the exposure you get will be the best possible result. For some unfathomable reason, I doubted my meter that morning when I know better. I apologized to my meter and promised to never doubt her again!

Joe Brady is a fine art and commercial photographer, public speaker, photography educator, and Webinar Manager at MAC Group.

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All text and images in this article are © Joe Brady.