This archival coastal image of tree roots on the edge of the lagoon at American River on Kangaroo Island in South Australia was part of a bunch of 5x4 colour negatives (Portra 160 ASA) that Atkins Lab -- a commercial photo lab in Adelaide -- cross processed in E6 processing by mistake.
I was pretty upset at the time and I wrote about the episode here. The cross processed files remained in the archives and were ignored. What has changed since then is that I've been seeing a variety of the hand crafted alternative processing images in the online exhibitions hosted by View Camera Australia. I found these images fascinating as they opened up a different way of doing photography to the perfection path I'd been engaged in.
Though I admired the work I was seeing in the online exhibitions I judged that the alternative processing pathway wasn't for me. I have enough problems with large format photography per se without taking a portable darkroom into the field as well and taking 3 years or more to become proficient in the process. The slow process of large format film photography has enough imperfection and unpredictability to act as counter balance to the computational digital for me.
What I did was to take another look at the ignored archival cross processed files but tI did so from the perspective of alternative processing. They actually looked ok.