Additive manufacturing is a rapidly growing industry in which complex components can be produced directly from a CAD file.  While this process can easily produce complex components, the propensity for defect formation is not small.  Therefore it is important to develop sensing procedures to ensure that quality components are produced.  Traditionally, melt pool imaging has been a source of significant interest due to the assumption that one could directly measure the geometry and temperature of the melt pool to more fully understand the build process.  Unfortunately, the co-axial camera data is not always interpreted correctly. Here, we show that under some conditions, melt pool measurements produced from a coaxial camera do not accurately estimate the melt pool geometry as measured post-process using an optical profilometer. Further, using an off-axis camera filtered to observe excited titanium plume emissions, we see a relationship between the size of the plume imaged by the plume camera and the size of the “meltpool” imaged by the coaxial camera.  We conclude that the excited vapor plume above the melt pool significantly obscures measurements, particularly at high energy inputs thus making measurements of meltpool geometry difficult. Potential mitigation strategies, such as illuminated melt pool imaging, will also be introduced.