Originally posted by bobbotron Sorry, wide exposure range... but I find you reeeeeally need to get the shot correctly exposed, and underexpose == a lot of loss of detail.
In the wet print only days, development times varied for the same film/developer combos up to 15-20% ( which is a lot) depending if you had a diffusion or condenser enlarger. Back then you needed to target a contrast index of the paper/enlarger combo.
Today, with scanning, you don't have to do that. The scanner and image editor contrast curve adjustment gives you a wider tolerance range for your development time. That is, your development time can be off easily up to 15% from normal and you'd not even notice the difference in the results with a good scanner and adjusting the contrast curve yourself. In other words, being a 1/3 or even a 1/2 stop off in exposure index is nothing. People get this 1/3 -stop exposure tolerance ( or even 1/2 stop) from positive film, I feel. BW negative film is a different animal with today's figital workflow. YMMV.
EDIT: Note all those shots were without a light meter (except the dog shot) and all rounded off to full-stop increments.