I have recently been conversing with Joe (Finder) via email, and he sent me something that I thought was worth sharing, once I got his permission to post it here. He's been very busy lately but has been very involved in doing B&W photography. Here's his interesting comments:

There is one important way that B&W can be by far the least challenging photographic medium; If you use Tri-X film, then the exposure lattitude is astounding - you almost can't over-expose it.
I've learned that the range of printable densities available on photographic paper is something like 50:1, and that of Tri-X is in the hundreds. Vestal says that a Tri-x frame (or areas within it) can appear opaque black upon hold-it-up-to-the-light inspection, and still contain several stops-worth of detailed, printable image yet -- it just needs more exposure on the enlarger. So picture this:
Pick the darkest area that contains important detail, and expose one or two stops down from there - then on the enlarger you can print up the shadows for dark, rich, lively details, and whatever is off-scale white on the print is still 'stored' in the denser areas of the negative! From there you can go toward lower-contrast printing papers to attempt to squeeze the wider ranging negative densities into the paper's range, or start burning-in the the highlights. You can, like, dump a 30sec. overall enlarger exposure - then go on for four minutes worth of burn-in for the backlight sky! there's like, four or five stops-worth of highlight detail locked in the film, if you expose for the shadows! Tri-x only has two stops of lattitude back from neutral down into the shadows. This is why Vestal considers Tri-x to be a 200-speed film - that way you get three stops down from neutral-gray, you already have a ton of room up on top, and so it's just a matter of longer enlarger exposure times.
"Expose for the shadows" makes sense, but not for all B&W films - I guess with some of them, the negative highlight density just 'blocks-up' a couple of stops past neutral. Then they're left with crappy exposure lattitude - like color film.

When I asked him if I could post this to the forum, as I thought it had some interesting points this was his reply: > Well - sure, man! I'd love to think that the forum gang would be interested in the subject.

Remember, though: about the worst shadow detail you can get is in a 24-bit color, or 8-bit monochrome scan! So... one problem is that anyone who gets into this B&W art print thing can't very well post good representations of their works. ...to be honest with you, that's maybe one of the reasons that I drifted from the forum a bit - I'm so dissapointed in how my stuff looks scanned. But it was all the folks on the forum that really sparked my new devotion to photography in the first place!
I gotta get back to the forum!

J.P.

Thanks all, hope you find this as interesting as I did,( and I don't even do darkroom stuff!) Joe's a good dude, and I hope he can get back to us from time to time.
:-)>