Hi, Ted.
Exposure charts can be found in textbooks and are also published (or WERE published at some time in the past) by film manufacturers. The lighting situation are often listed as being so many stops more than BDE (except in a few cases, like bright snow or sand), which is Basic Daylight Exposure. BDE is AKA the exposure you use when applying the "crystal clear and sunny f/16 rule", which around these parts is usually the "somewhat less than crystal clear but close enough to fool most people who are used to it f/11 rule".
Kind of confusing. I would check a library for a textbook, or maybe look around on the Internet.
But if you know how to take what your reflected meter is telling you and adjust off of it to get the best exposure, instead of just going with what it tells you, I might just do that. Just remember that an in-camera reflected meter tells you the most accuracy-rendering exposure ONLY for a scene in which all the tones metered average out to middle grey. So, you might get a fine exposure in flat light, but it would, of course, look flat on the print as well.
From experience, in your situation, if I had to use the in-camera meter instead of an incident meter, I would be tempted to rate the film at 800 or 1000 just to get an accurate meter reading at first. Then I would probably get whatever exposures I could at a fixed fast enough shutter speed, whether the meter sez it's OK or not. Take note of how far off from your meter you are actually exposing, and develop it for extra time to increase the contrast the necessary amount to compensate.
As for particular developers that others like, forget it. All developers work fine, and there is not a huge make-it-or-break-it difference in results between them in my experience. Just use what you normally use, and go with what the box sez using distilled water, which is likely more similar to what Ilford uses to arrive at their recommendations than your tap water is.
Someone had the good shortcut of rating at 1600 and developing with the recommended time for 3200. That's a great shortcut for flat light. What this does is darkens your shadows about 2/3 of a stop, without moving the tones TOO far down the characteristic curve for the film, thus maintaining a nice placement of tones that will give you you lots of control with development. Then the development brings up the contrast and brightens most of the tones in the composition except the very lowest ones. Then you will probably end up with everything falling into a nice range on the neg. that will let you do whatever you want when you print the pix.
)
