Gordon Moat writes:

they were in the distant past. A modern comparison of Incident .vs.
Reflected metering is at:

http://www.sekonic.com/BenefitsOfIncident.html The images show the
comparison nicely.

I mildly disagree with that page; not a big deal to me, but it _is_ written
by a company promoting its incident meters.

My very humble opinion is that no meter readings should be followed
mindlessly. If one is using a reflected meter, one must think about where
the gray should fall in the scheme of the values present in the scene. I
think reading various items in a scene with a reflected meter gives me
better control over which item I place as my main 'correct' reading. It may
be that I would want a black plate black, but I may not want a shadow which
would be rendered 'correctly' black to _be_ black in the final exposure. (I
shoot slides, so my among my concerns are the limited lattitude of the film
and blown out highlights.) I think the test shot on that page is rigged.
:- It doesn't reflect the things _I_ take pictures of, incidentally.

"Mercilessly recording all things as medium gray," as that Web page says is
really the photographers' "Mindlessly reading all things a medium gray,"
not the meter's fault. Mindlessly following an incident meter will not
guarantee that the result is what I _want_.

I've read the original post and its quote, and I have no clue what the
context was for that quote. I also question the source's use of "field
tests" or whatever the phrase was. I remember Kodak surveying photographers
for years about what they wanted, and the replies always were 'accurate
colors.' Then Fuji showed people images and asked which they
preferred. Accurate colors lost every time to the "bright golden haze on
the meadow," as Rogers and Hammerstein wrote back in the 50s.

I may not even want the accurate colors the incident meter mindlessly
promises. And the "highlight and shadow areas [that] will fall naturally into
place" may be outside my film's latitude.

Shrug. People get to make their choices, and I have no idea what tests
showed that reflected readings were more pleasing (I suspect the tests were
skewed, but who knows), but using any meter without considering the
range of readings, the reflectivity of the items in the shot, and what the
photographer wants the subject of the image to be drives me to post my
mild rant.
--
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