Experimental editing of past photos - Rowan

Just some experiments I have been doing in Lightroom trying new ways to edit photos. I think its interesting how film grain is nearly always more appealing than digital noise, and while film grain is not necessarily bad, digital noise is something that photographers tend to try and avoid if at all possible.  I thought it could be fun to try and accentuate the grain in some of my night photographs. By shooting at a much higher ISO than I would even use if I wanted to preserve the sharpness and resolution of a photo, it was sort of freeing to push my ISO to 1600, 3200, 6400, and even higher and be able to walk around and snap away nearly at my normal pace. Digital Cameras have gotten so good at reproducing our world in an utterly flawless and exact way, that sometimes I am wishing for the more stylized and unique look that film inherently possesses. The perfection of digital of coarse is the very thing that makes it such an incredible tool, but also becomes one of its biggest drawbacks for me. The normality and lifeless accuracy in which digital cameras record the world have made me feel I must either compensate in my editing, or improve the subject matter I put in front of the lens. With digital, its very ease of use means there is no excuse to for an uninteresting photo. (Of coarse, 'uninteresting' or 'interesting' is highly subjective, and I am guilty of an uncountable number of objectively 'uninteresting' photos. But again that is the inherent beauty of digital, the ability to endlessly experiment without consequence, right?)
Bringing the photos into Lightroom, I would increase the exposure of the photos by several stops which would introduce even higher noise levels in often distracting and strange ways. The way I saw it, it is sort of like shooting with expired film. You may have an idea of how a photo will turn out, but you don't really ever know it will look until you bring it into the darkroom/Lightroom. Increasing exposure introduced into the image all sorts of banding, grain, and color shifts that I never could have gotten had I actively tried to keep the ISO low, and in my opinion gives the photos a strange sort of eerie mysterious look. I think that while these are far from ideal or perfect photographs, it is an interesting experimental technique to have in my editing knowledge. If I drastically underexpose a photo on accident, I shouldn't be afraid to experiment more with this technique and try to push it in such similarly intense and abstract ways. I will keep working on this style of editing I think.