I love using a lightmeter.
Not because it’s cool, but because it simply makes my life a lot easier and it doesn’t make me look like an amateur that’s just guessing my exposure. 

Now a lot of people think a lightmeter is difficult to use. But in essence it’s pretty simple. Just hold it in front of the area you want correctly lit and voila you have your exposure. (Don’t point towards anything, it’s an incident meter so hold it on front of the area you want to be correct. In most cases this does mean to meter towards the light source btw). 

In this shot I actually used a combination of reflective and incident. First reflective to meter the outside and when I got the look I want (I metered a cloud and and opened up 2.5 stops. This is done because the reflective meter will give you the value for 18% gray so you have to calculate from there) 

Now that I know the exposure to get the sky the way I want I simply use that same aperture to set up the strobe and done. 

As you can see. Using a meter takes out all the guess work. Want to know more about lightmeters? Check out my instructional video about the meter on www.frankdoorhof.com/videos