Jim Grey, in a recent post on his always thoughtful Down the Road blog, posed the question "How much AI is too much?".
After I used Exposure 7's damaged wet plate preset (it's not AI) on a pair of pretty terrible exposures, I had to ask myself "When is an image truly analog?" I don't think I have an answer to that, and to be honest, for me it's somewhat of a moot point.
I don't shoot film because it's superior to digital, or just to be anachronistic (although I do love archaic technologies including cameras), but because I like the look, variability and unpredictability of it.
In the case of these two shots though, I definitely did not like the look of them, but I was hesitant to just scrap them. I hadn't used Exposure 7 in quite a while and my thought was that it certainly couldn't make them any worse than they were already. Exposure 7 has vast slew of presets, so many that it's almost hard to choose from among them. Their wet plate and especially the damaged wet plate are probably the least subtle of their presets. But I don't think I'm usually much for subtlety when it comes to photos.
These were shot with Rerapan 400 and my Sawyer's MKIV TLR and developed in an Xtol/MQ-19 mixture.
