>>4307184You do not "find" a midtone when using a spotmeter. It's the wrong way to think about how a spot meter works. Do not apply incident meter thinking to a spot meter.
A spot meter shows you the exposure that would set your metered area to zone 5, or middle gray. With that information you set your exposure to place your metered area into the correct zone.
You must properly expose shadows or you will not get information onto the film, so pick the darkest section that has important information, and then increase your exposure setting by 3 stops. That will place your shadows at zone 2, which is as dark as you can get while still recording detail/information.
>>4307029 look at pic. The different zones are stops of exposure.
NOW you measure your highlights. If your highlights are showing over the maximum dynamic range of your film then you must reduce the contrast of the negative by pulling the development. When you reduce your development time it stops the highlights from becoming too dense to print/scan. There are dev times you can look up when doing this with certain developers.
It becomes difficult to utilize pushing/pulling properly if you are developing an entire roll of film, so you need to decide if a little bit more highlight information or a little bit more shadow information is more important to you. Generally speaking decent b&w film is pretty good at retaining highlights, so I would suggest focusing on proper shadow exposure, so you can get as much information onto your negstive as possible.
Read about the zone system if you want a better explanation.
