Tinkering With Grain (C&C welcome)

[W.Y.Photo]

I don't think grain is necessarily pleasing in film, that seems to be something of a misconception. Although I play around some with plastic cameras (with plastic lenses and next to no settings), it seems to be a matter of figuring out how to best use them (for me it depends on the subject, film speed, lighting conditions, etc.). But with a decent lens and the proper speed film I think the expectation is that the grain would be minimal, just as having an expectation of a digital image having minimal noise.

I'm not saying grain is great and we should want grain to be visible when shooting film. I just mean that when compared side by side people often say that grain is more aesthetically pleasing. What I am attempting is to create images in which noise would actually be preferable to grain.


Anyways.. The image the OP posted is a good example of what grain filters do.. They distort noise into a grain like structure or overlay a grain like grid on the image. The only problem is that grain is so much finer in detail than a pixel, so those filters, being pixelated, tend to just look like noise anyways..