Hi Nogbad
To a certain extent I was replying to Christine's mention of an earlier post I'd made on Birdforum. I was trying to explain how you could use a meter to 'explore' different lighting conditions as much as finding a correct exposure for a particular shot.
In the 'good old days' before many cameras had built-in meters, many photographers would routinely check their light meters against anything which might perhaps make a good shot and in so doing they gained a great deal of experience in judging a situation even before lifting the camera to the eye.
Providing you can recognise a 'difficult' situation and know how to over-ride a camera's auto settings to deal with it then there's no real reason to use a seperate meter, especially with digital where you can take a lot of shots at different settings and then judge them closely afterwards.
Light meters are not at all complicated when you get them in your hand - by first choosing your ISO, then setting the EV value from your subject you get the shutter speeds on one dial coinciding with apertures on the other. Any of the combinations will give you the correct exposure - you choose whichever shutter-speed or aperture you require and set the other accordingly. If you see, say, 1/125th sec opposite F8 then the next one along will have 1/250th sec opposite F5.6 and so on - if the precise combination you require doesn't appear then you can adjust the ISO until you get what you want (or wait for the sun to shine!)
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