For the white picture I used a white piece of copy paper, and for the black one I used a t-shirt. I think the reason they looked so similar without the meter was because of the way the light reflected off of the surfaces. Once I added the meter, it brings out the lighter and darker tones in whichever object I used and allowed the color of the object to be a lot more rich and concentrated. I pushed the meter up to make the paper whiter, and pushed it down to make the black t-shirt even darker.