A lo-o-o-o-o-ong philosophical post
Frank Doorhof said:
I will get burned/flamed for this......
Not at all - in fact your post made me think why some people (including myself) pay so much attention to the technical details of photography sometimes. After thinking about it a bit I think I can answer for myself:
Frank Doorhof said:
I know it's always better to do something else, but why not just do what the camera is good at, taking pictures.
This is the crucial question. And in a long and indirect way it leads to the answer of my own question above.
Taking pictures – for me - has always been easy, pleasant and a lot of fun – I have been doing it since I was six. Buy a roll of film, shoot, take it to the lab, get the (black and white) prints, enjoy - nice and simple.
Then in high school I started to develop and print my own black and white photos. Initially I was learning and was happy to just get a decent looking recognizable photo. But as I learned I started to see that a photo is not an "absolute truth" – something which strangely enough I had not realized until then – and I was quite "shocked". I started playing with different contrast papers and developers, burning, dodging and… something for which I do not know the proper term in English – when you expose the paper to white light for a short time half way through development. I would spend inordinate amounts of time (nights) and paper printing the same photo again and again trying different things.
So now the look of a print had become to a large extent a matter of my interpretation and while I found that slightly disconcerting I actually enjoyed it.
I certainly spent much more time in the dark kitchen at night then I spent shooting
Then color film became cheap enough (I am not a hundred years old – I simply lived in Eastern Europe
and I started shooting only color. The dark room equipment started collecting dust in the wardrobe and photography was once again an absolute thing for me. Buy a roll, shoot, take it to the (cheapest possible) lab, get prints... there was no accessible/cheap pro lab and therefore there was no custom printing or "I do not like these prints" for me. The operator of the minilab made all the decisions for me and in fact I kind of liked it, my mother certainly liked it – the kitchen was once again safe at night
... a few years pass ...
Which brings me to May of this year when I eventually bought a 30D. Being a programmer I did not even for a second consider shooting JPEG – it is an ATROCIOUS destruction of data - and here I totally agree with John! I did shoot RAW+JPEG though and for a whole month did not touch the RAW files. But then of course I went back to the "darkroom" or rather lightroom (is this trademarked by Adobe already?) and I have to say having color – at least for me – makes it much harder. Now the look of my photos is even more a matter of my interpretation – and I still have not gotten used to it.
To finally answer your question "why not just do what the camera is good at, taking pictures" - I am, and since that is as easy and pleasant as it has always been I do not need to discuss it in forums
The
artistic side of developing RAW files on the other hand is still too hard for me and I do not consider myself qualified to discuss it – for now I am still reading and learning.
But treating RAW data as numbers (and it is numbers!) and analyzing it in every possible way - I am very qualified to do - and feel confident to comment on what I find. Therefore when I found something interesting I decided to share it.
As to why the combing is bad I think John answered very-very well in his last two messages.
