Ysarex
Been spending a lot of time on here!
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You can totally Zone System digital. The happy thing is that if you get the "development" wrong, then you get to do it again.
Meter the highlights and shadows, shoot for an exposure that will balance them around the middle per your taste (ETTR? Just half/half? ETTL? Whatever you like. But remember that you have something like 12 stops +/- to play with). You can probably just wing this step, to be honest, but if you enjoy
"Shadews at 20 candles peh meteh squahed, place shadews on zewn wun. Highlights at 5000 candles peh meteh squahed place highlights on zewn 0. normahl minus tew developmint indicated."
and then write all that down, by all means. It's definitely fun nerdy stuff.
Then do a RAW conversion with a suitable development curve to bring the shadows and highlights wherever you visualized them. You could probably do some presets in whatever your preferred RAW converter to do normal/+/- development.
(As for how I shoot, well, I wing it, and chimp a lot, and then fuss around in converters and editors until it looks right. Which is not the Zone System. At All.)
The relationship between film exposure, film development and film tone response does not exist when you expose a digital sensor. Extending the time your sensor sits in a tank of HC-110 won't have any effect on the data it records.
You can simulate all kinds of things digitally. You can simulate film grain in a digital image. You won't have film grain when you're done but you can have a simulation. There's got to be a reason for the simulation e.g. you like the look of film grain. You can simulate Zone System exposure and processing digitally as suggested, but for what reason. In this case you're conducting a simulation that produces an inferior result with no benefit. Zone System photographers use the technique to get the best possible result given less than ideal circumstances. Those same people using a digital camera still want the best possible result and so they change their technique to match the tool.
"Expose for the shadows and process for the highlights" is the wrong way to treat a digital sensor. With a digital sensor you expose for the highlights and process for the highlights, midtones and shadows to get the best result.
Joe