I have a question concerning the exposure settings when scanning negatives:
Imagine I take a picture of mostly fog. Without manual correction, the camera would place the fog in zone V (middle grey) and to avoid this, the image is typically overexposed to some degree.
I had this situation few weeks ago on a frosty and foggy day and to compensate for the „brightness“ of the fog I metered for the ground (tilting the camera down), placing it in zone V.

Now the images I got back from the lab are much darker than I wanted them to turn out and I would like to find out what went wrong.
My main question is: does the scanner place the whole picture in zone V again, like the meter of the camera would do it? So no matter how much I overexpose, the picture is always placed in middle grey. Or are negatives typically scanned with one setting for a certain type of film to make sure bright images are bright and dark images are dark? (Or did I really underexpose this picture?)

I asked the lab and I got the answer that a human judges the brightness of each picture individually while scanning. But that would mean to get the look I want, the person judging the brightness needs to know how I intended the picture to look like. I was going for a bright and airy look.

Here is one example picture (taken with Canon AE-1 on Portra 400):
[![(Taken with Canon AE-1 on Portra 400)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbeem.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/kbeem.jpg)

Which looks muddy to me. Does anyone know how I could fix this picture? And in what zone would you place the fog?

I am thankful for any help!