self portrait of the artist on the eve of her 21st birthday

let's be honest. the negatives are shit because the vintage lightmeter i was using gave me a reading two stops too low. i printed them on a 3 filter, which strikes me as a cardinal sin in the church of ansel adams (side note: i thought about changing my facebook religious views to 'the zone system', but realized no one would find that funny). but it's not like these are photographs that i can reshoot, and they will still remain valuable to me because of their moment in time. just goes to show the beautiful images that i have produced in the past are not by accident, but by a deliberate and arduous process that typically goes shoot-catastrophe-reevaluate-reshoot. but what if we instilled an ethic of photographic process that can't be subject to this form of reiteration? that too has to answer to contingency? would roland barthes roll over in his grave?