It's an emulation of a process rather than a process itself, I guess the extreme of this is the film plug-ins to emulate a film stock when shooting fully digital.
Not wishing to do too many contortions but, isn't the business of "emulating" equally as much a process ?
Yes, I could have simply taken a preset or plug-in and applied that but, what I did was to carefully analyse the result I wanted and worked out what it was about that result that gave it its distinctive look.
The image started life as a carefully worked out 5x4 negative on Fuji Acros 100 film. The depth of field was deliberately reduced to a minimum by using a Fujinon T 400mm lens at f/8. The lighting was a window to the left and a white reflector to the right to gently fill the deep shadows.
So far, no different to any other analogue image. However, I don't have multiple LF cameras, old brass lenses, wet plate facilites, etc., but I did want to invoke a sense of times gone by.
I wasn't trying to fool people into believing that it really was an "old" print. All of the changes I made could just as well have been made in a wet darkroom, using traditional darkroom processes but, since I can achieve similar results using a computer and software…
I am making no attempt to emulate the old process; instead I am using a modern process to achieve the same look and feel (inasmuch as it is feasible). I am not even attempting to emulate a particular film, otherwise I could have simply chosen one of DxO's FilmPack presets.
Yes, there may be "connoisseurs" who are obsessed with everything about the images they buy being "authentic" but I would argue that that is something we can never truly achieve; on that basis, why don't we insist that all flash pictures are taken with powder flashes, or that all continuous lighting is provided with carbon filament bulbs rather than LED lighting?
In the end, we are looking for a particular end result. How we achieve that result is a process. The term "alternative process" has somehow been translated as being an alternative chemical process. Surely, isn't using a computer just another alternative process?
At the end of the day, the customer is king and, if the customer is willing to pay good money for a silver print, processed on a computer and printed by Ilford on their excellent papers, how much are we fooling ourselves that the "process" is what matters?
Apart, that is, from our own sense of achievement in having managed to keep an historic craft alive