It's aimed at the person I quoted....
He decides what to set the camera at, without the camera doing it. I'm just interested where he pulls that information from to know what to set the variables (f/stop, ss, ISO) at.
How I would do it
ISO on base setting.
F stop - depends on composition-if no near foreground open the lens up a little. Not too much though as you’ll see centre to edge sharpness fall off. That’s lens dependent though.
Obviously stop down if there’s foreground near by.
Place a filter on if you need to darken the sky a little. For my shots it’s almost exclusively a 3 stop soft. I just know this for years of shooting the types of pictures I take.
Live view on, get focus sorted and check the edges of the frame if you’re cutting off or including things you don’t intend. Pay attention to the edges. You cannot add in what you’ve cut off later but you can crop a little.
Get that histogram up on live view and adjust shutter speed accordingly so you’ve got no clipping and as little blocking as possible. With filters and modern cameras there’s a lot of scenes where the histogram won’t reach either end. Expose a little to the right making sure in final exposure none of the red, blue and greens are hit.
After Exposure, check blinkers and histogram as you might have room for one more click on the shutter wheel to get a bit more light in. Or you might have to go one down. Re-expose and check histogram. Are any of the red, green and blue histograms clipping. If so a little or a lot. Are more than one. If so you could be losing key data due to over exposure. The white histogram shows over luminance but the red, green and blues matter a lot. Over exposure can blow out say the red in a poppy field but the luminosity chart may not show any signs of over exposure - in a scene where one colour dominates its vital you check RGB charts. Check the colours - I cannot stress that enough. I mean it as you don’t want to lose detail if you can help it. In post in curves/levels you can banish any colour cast by setting white and black points on each curve to get it properly neutral - not necessary with every shot particularly if each colour histogram starts and ends in the same place but a lot of the time it’s how I process rather than chump around with contrast sliders until I’m happy. Understand histograms and curves. Once you do you’re there for landscapes.
I rarely shoot into the sun - always away from as I like the light from a rising/setting sun but not the event. Filters on the lens element can add flare if shooting into the sun so I’d take two and blend - or do a long exposure and over expose using a black case waving it over the sky part of the image - at 5 secs you’ll ghost this out and darken the top.
I do this all the time for cityscape reflections as filters add a lot of flare marks when shooting scenes with lights in them