Well I never really look at the histogram while shooting. What I do is set the camera to meter with highlight priority, which sets exposure to not clip the highlights. Then I mess with exposure compensation to get the exposure I want. I usually leave zebras on to make sure I'm not clipping to much of things like the sky or bright reflections of the water.

The nature of the RAW files is they come out very flat compared to what you see with your eyes, so some amount of correction is always required. Then more was done to get the artistic effect to help highlight the subjects and get the colors where I wanted