Hi Walter,
Thanks very much for your advice! I metered this with the incident meter on my Sekonic 758D meter, which is something I rarely use but wanted to try and get an understanding of using it. To be honest, I did little more than point the meter at the camera from the machine and used the value offered. I usually meter with my spot meter and check my low values - set my shadows into zone 3 - and check my highlights for over exposure. I've been thinking about using BTZS but until I've figured out a proper methodology for incident metering, I'm not sure it's an option.
Are you suggesting that perhaps I should have increased exposure on the shadow areas by perhaps half a stop or so and then decreased the development by a percentage (which I'll figure out through testing I guess!)? I will have to try that but might get the 4x5 out again to practice rather than throwing $5 a shot at experimentation
I did use a little bit of tilt which brought a bit more of the scene into focus - I'm still not fully confident with using tilt. I still find that if I use front tilt just a tiny bit then I start getting mo into focus, but using much more than what feels like only a degree or two of front tilt and then I end up with a very shallow area of focus. I'm heading out most lunchtimes to experiment though.
How you guys learned all this before the Internet is beyond me! I've got this wealth of information at my fingertips and I'm still not getting it right!