Canon 5D III metering

One of the areas that I look on improving, is
my

1. ability to walk upon a scence
   
2. identify the lighting situation
   
3. determine my metering approach
   
4. and execute
   

You can attempt to learn what colors map to about 18% tonality

Yeah, green grass often works quite well, or grey road surface, or the back of your hand. Not all will necessarily give the correct meter reading (and grey roads can be quite variable, grass too but less so) but get you close and if you know that the back of your hand (or typical grass) is half a stop below correct (for example) then you can just meter your hand and add half a stop for a pretty accurate result.

Obviously, make sure that your hand (or whatever) is in the same light as the subject you intend to shoot.

However you choose to meter, it is well worth taking a test shot and checking the histogram, that will give you a very good idea of how good your exposure is.

If light is consistent and not likely to change, you can set exposure in manual and just leave it alone, if lighting is variable then you may be better off with Av or Tv and let them vary exposure as the shot varies between shade and bright sun, using EC if needed.

Set your picture style to neutral, -4 contrast, zero the rest
check the histogram and blinkies
look for something white, spot meter, add +2 compensation

There are different "schools of thought" for this stuff! Also, be aware that there are differences to how one might approach exposure/metering with a digital camera/sensor and how folks "traditionally" approached shooting with film, and even for different types of film (slide vs. print for example).

And then in the digital "world" we have the "normal" approach of shooting jpegs so that the exposure needs to be a "correct"/medium exposure whereas when shooting in the Raw format it can be beneficial to bump the exposure a bit "To The Right" and then "recover" highlight details in a Raw processor, or maybe try to use the "Raw advantage" to recover more shadow detail than would be possible with a jpeg so that you can keep from "blowing" important highlights!

But I do use little "conveniences" when shooting, since I do a lot of outdoors shooting (I'm not a studio photographer). For example, you mention using a blue sky to meter off of, and to me on a clear-sky day that has been helpful. I meter the blue sky and set my exposure to +1 EV (in manual) and that does a good job. I have my Picture Style set to Neutral with the Saturation and Contrast both dialed down to -4 so that I don't get misleading reads/alerts. With the sky exposed at +1 EV, highlights can be a bit bright, but shooting in Raw gives me a good ability to "tame" them!

windpig wrote in post #16211056
Set your picture style to neutral, -4 contrast, zero the rest
check the histogram and blinkies
look for something white, spot meter, add +2 compensation

This is what I do. Well, minus the -4 contrast. If there is nothing white, I use a white persons face at +1. If there are no white people, I use my hand.

Oh, and also try and get a WB that is close, it has a huge effect on exposure when eyeing the histogram and blinkies.

Shane, the -4 contrast really gets that unbiased histogram down pat.