The craft of photography

Recently I have been reading an interesting book called the Craft of Photography, by David Vestal. This is an old school black and white film photography book (published in 1972) about developing and printing techniques. Mr Vestal has some interesting things to say about exposure calculations, repeating the ancient photographic adage 'Expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights'. He encourages making some test shots to identify the best exposure for a particular film and development combination. He talks about using a separate exposure meter, which for most of my older cameras is what I use as they don't have built in meters. The technique works like this.
1) Choose a high contrast subject with both dark and light parts to it.
2) Using the light meter measure the exposure reading from the darkest part of the subject that you want to be able to see detail.
3) Make a test shot at this exposure.
4) Open the lens 1 stop and make another test shot
5) Open the lens another stop and make another test shot
6) Make a test shot with the lens 1 stop closed down from the meter reading.
7) Develop the film in the normal way and view the results.
These are my results (taken with my Olympus OM-2 in manual mode - film is Legacy Pro 100 - a Fuji film, developed in Rodinal, stand development 1+100 for 1 hour) ):

1/60th at F5.6 - this was the meter indicated setting from the dark areas of the camera body 

1/60th at F8 - this is +1 stop from the meter reading

1/60th at F11 - this is +2 stops from the meter reading (bit dark - under exposed)

1/60 at f4 - this is -1 stop from the meter reading and was the exposure indicated by the camera's own internal meter.

Which one is best?? 

Well interestingly the camera's own meter overexposes the shot, perhaps because of the white paper under the camera. What we are looking for is the best rendering of the dark tones. If you compare the shot taken at the meter reading and the one taken +1 stop side by side:

You can see that the one on the left, which is +1 stop gives the best shadow detail and the best contrast. The conclusion is therefore to get the best exposure, take a meter reading off the darkest part of the subject then open the lens 1 stop. Which is exactly what Mr Vestal recommends in his book!.