I almost exclusively spot meter. Might be useful to me. There just is not much for me to shoot right now. The grandson (3.5 years old) is just now starting to ham it up a little. Very little. Honestly cannot wait for the pandemic to be over.
I hear you! Same here. My wife and I had actually converted our master bedroom into a portrait studio this year in February. (Now we sleep in a little in-law suite.) I tiled, painted, mounted backdrop racks and a boom arm, got a few stools and a tiny settee for posing. I even had clientele who wanted traditional formal portraits to supplement location lifestyle...And then came the pandemic and masks on everybody.
(I do believe our Creator has the best comic timing in the universe! But I am very aware that many people have suffered terribly from the actual effects of Covid-19, and the hyped-hysteria and anxiety. It's just how ironic it felt to have put in the work--and then portrait photography effectively put on a global pause. Don't we all personalize big events to some extent some of the time?)
But there is hope with the vaccines, etc. And just Saturday we went for a walk around the local college campus and were allowed to enter the stadium. Lots of people climbing the stairs for exercise, or checking out the fake "fans" in the seats. And then I started talking to a security guard. He told me very proudly that his daughter had just passed her bar exam on the first try. We were in the shade of an overhang, but the bright light from the field shone beautiful light on his face, and so I asked to take his photo. He hesitated a moment, but I just told him how great he looked, and that I would not post the image anywhere. My kids and wife were waiting for me. He smiled and agreed, so I offered him my email address for a copy of the photo, which, by the way, came out great! And he wrote to me last night asking for it.
I had on my mask to take the photo, but, using a 70-200mm, I was back far enough for us both to feel comfortable. He lowered his mask and I took the shot.
A word here about the R6. I had been experimenting Saturday with Fv mode. I was just starting to get the hang of it, but while chatting had forgotten about it. My shutter speed was set at 1/640th, and though my aperture was at f/3.5, because of the shade we were in, and the spot meter reading, the ISO had shot up to 4000. With the R or 5DIV, this would have been barely usable, but with the R6 it cleaned up beautifully with just a touch of noise reduction in LR CC, and I got a very pleasing shot of a man beaming with pride as he thought of his daughter, the new lawyer.
Ok! Enough of my stories! Hang in there!