... Journal Entry
I loathe post processing, adjusting settings, moving sliders back and forth, masking, zooming in and out, spending endless hours editing and previewing images in front of a computer screen is a huge pain. It is one contributing factor as to why I don't use digital much and continue to use mostly film for my photography.
Film forces me to concentrate and, as a medium, enables my objective of getting things right first time in camera, meaning that I spend the absolute minimum time in post, normally a matter of three or four clicks in my fave post tools, for images scanned from my negatives that I use to upload to this website.
Typically, I load my professionally scanned negatives into Radiant Photo, let it select the appropriate "look", then save them back out. Occasionally, I may tweak a couple of parameters but that's it. Radiant makes my scanned images from colour negatives shine suitable for display across the web with the minimum of fuss or intervention on my part.
No messing about in hyperspace; the colours, tones, shadow detail, highlights and grain structure are built into the film itself just the way I like them, making how my photos basically look way ahead of the curve when they come out of the camera, Post processing is simply making the final gradation tweaks to images after the variations caused to them by the vagaries of the various scanner set ups.
If I want a very different look? Well I certainly will not spend eons behind a screen post processing the heck out of a scanned image trying create one. Nope, I will simply chose a film with characteristics close to my desired outcome, maybe Porta 800 or Ektar 100 or Ultramax 400 or Lomo Metropolis or Lomo Color 92 or Harman Phoenix ... I love the process of using film with film cameras to make photographs.
Come to think of it, the more I use digital cameras the more I loathe them too. Digital photography is an oxymoron. Well maybe that is a little extreme 😀.