What do you do if your built in light meter on your D90 is miss reading?

I recently learned how to adjust my manual settings based off of reading the internal light meter on my Nikon D90 at a photography workshop. I was so excited. It took a lot of the guess work out of adjusting aperture, shutter speed and iso on my own. Everything was going fine until recently. I would typically expose +2 or -2 depending on the situation and all would be fine, but now something is wrong. Now when I set my exposure at +2 or -2, everything gets completely blown out. What did I do wrong? How can I troubleshoot to correct this situation? I want to bring it in to Ritz camera (I originally bought my D90 from there) to get some help. I would greatly appreciate any help I can get!

There are three metering modes of the D90 according to different distribution of brightness, distance, and color.

Consult your D90 user's maual. Exposure and Metering section.

+2 and -2 are quite extreme values for exposure compensation… Odds are that things didn't work correctly when you got used to using them, and now things work the way they're supposed to and you're seeing the extreme effect of these values.

So… Just don't use ±2 but, say, ±1 or even less than that. After all, the closer your exposure compensation can remain to ±0, the better is your light meter working. Deviate from that only if the situation demands it.

Also check your metering mode. Might you have accidentally switched to a different one? Spot metering can give you wildly varying results if you're not careful about where you take the reading from.

Sounds like the inner part of your lens or the image sensor inside your camera needs cleaning. The internal mirror for the image sensors will develop a film on it over time.taking it to Ritz, wolf, B&H or some other professional camera shop to have everything checked and cleaned is actually not a bad idea because if you use the wrong materials you can scratch the lenses or mirrors in your camera

http://www.youtube.com/.../daddytech

At +2 everything is bright. At -2 it gets totally dark. That's the way it is unless somethings really wrong with the meter. Yes you could check metering modes as they do have significant differences. I stick to spot for simplicity - meter the subject and adjust according to how the background and foreground should appear. You could test the meter yourself. Shoot a 0 EV then go up bit by bit (by thirds or halves depending on your setting) shooting each time then do it the way down from 0 too. If you can see the differences in exposure level between each consecutive shot then there shouldn't be any cause for alarm.