Well here's the thing,

I have found that by exposing for the sky (prior to my getting a light-meter) was about my pointing the camera towards the sky, getting the exposure and then going down 1 or 2 stops depending on how bright the day or light is. This usually should give a pretty good exposure for the sky as well as the rest of the photo (this is how i used to expose when shooting slide flim, but without the underexposing).

A friend, having read about it somewhere, said that you could do the same thing by exposing for the greens (bushes, trees, grass etc....) and then bringing it down 2 stops, he tried it and said it works.

Now, regarding what you said about shutter speed / f-stop balance, it depends on what you are shooting, as well as your lens(es). If you have the possibility of setting the focus to infinity (which you wanna do when shooting landscape), basically wanting to get maximum depth of field, then the f-stop is not gonna be much of an issue.... however, if when shooting landscape with most lenses today (at our financial level anyway) then you want to go with maximum f-stop (i.e. f/22 or more depending on the lens) which by default will cause the shutter to be whatever it should be! By setting the camera on Aperture priority (Av) and setting the aperture on f/22 or more, then exposing the sky will give you the required shutter speed to expose the sky properly.... under-exposing by 2 stops will give you a good range for most of tones.

The light meter, by giving me the proper exposure for 18% grey (which is half way between balck and white), gives me the best exposure without worrying about my highlights and shadows (not much anyway)....

However, the thing is, I think that we need to understand the area we are shooting.... for example here, just lately has the temperature gone down to 80 with about 50% humidity... (a month ago it was 113 with 80% humidity.... I wont tell you how much it was during the summer).... All photos i took mid-day, were with a bright white sky...devoid of any color or character.... but the sunrise shots, well.... they were a whole different thing...

At the end, i believe that the quality of light, in places such as the ones we are in, plays a major role... so probably even a polariser will not make such a huge difference (at least for now).... but for what it's worth, it did make a difference on the colors of the other elements in the photo which were too bright without the polarizer....

As for the other filters, the reason i don't see how important, or worth the money, they are with DSLR's, is because of white balance issues.... Digitally speaking, I found that I am better off adding these filters in post if i need to, rather than using them on camera.... I got the filters for my film camera (which i still love using), and tried with my DSLR... now it might be because of how comfortable i am using photoshop that i don't see the relevance of such filters (Color filters, or ND filters, CC filters)... Graduated filters do make things much easier!... but that is pretty much it!

I'll post some photos when I can.... and compare them with the ones i took the other weekend exposing with my light-meter.....

cheers,

Marc