Hi Nemesis.
As Ken says, spot metering needs to be used with a bitof care, such as the zone system.
Think about what the meter is telling you: that whatever you're pointing it at will render at 12% gray when photographed using the settings it's telling you.
So that's fine if you're pointing it at something that's 12% gray. Otherwise you have to adjust it. The zone system (you can google for a simplified zone system more approriate to digital photography) says to find the brightest area you want detail in, and give that about 2, maybe 3, stops more (depending on the dr of your camera)
Or you can look for the deepest shadow you want detail in and give that 2-3 stops less.
In Ansel Adams day you would expose for one of these, and develop for the other, an option not available to us. So we have to expose for the highlights we want to keep and hope we have anough dr to capture detail in the shadows.
We can help that along a bit by using Adobe Raw to extract a bit more dr in the highlights, and GNDs to try and bring the dr of the subject into the rangeof the sensor.
Good luck!
i
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