Another Filter Question - When will this madness end?

When you use a grad you should be able to see it in the viewfinder when you slot it in or slide it up/down.

The way that I was told to use a grad (and works pretty well) was to first meter the scene by judging the sky exposure (i.e pointing the camera up a bit from what your shooting) and then the ground/foreground by pointing the camera downward a bit; then work out the difference in stops. Use the ground exposure as the exposure setting that your going to use and slide the grad in, positioning it in the the viewfinder and then take your picture.
Note that you may not need a grad a lot of the time, unless your shooting slide and even then I don't find that their always as neccessary as some of the digital crowd make out.

A tobocco grad is basically a brown filter to be used with colour film to make the sky look a bit more interesting (to me effects like that look completely false).
 
I'm asking partly because I used Provia 400X recently; the resulting skies were wonderful but the land parts were all under-exposed. In the immediately preceding shots with Agfa Vista the skies were so-so and the land was OK...
 
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