A Mild Rant

I had a student, in a way, ridicule me for having a DSLR camera.

He visited my photo website and told me he thought most of my photos were photoshopped. 

"Some", I said

It wasn't ridicule per se. But he very smugly, in a way only Germans can, showed me a picture he took with his SLR camera.

"No Photoshop" he said.

"I like pictures that are more natural and 'hand made'." he said.

Stuff it up your kraut ass, I thought.

Because he wasn't really saying his preference, he was telling me, and the thousands of other digital SLR owners out there, that what we do is less creative and less natural and less valid than he and his little bag of filters and "was that the correct exposure?" film camera simply because we use a computer instead of a photo lab to process our images.

Seriously, can we all please get off the dogmatic SLR vs DSLR argument? The pictures look AS DAMN GOOD with either now, and there are some things you can do with a DSLR that you cannot with an SLR and visa versa.

I've seem over-processed images from both platforms. Underexposed film that was push-processed 2 stops to purposely give it a grainy look, or digitally enhanced images to make colors saturated.

They are creative tools and each has a use.

And I don't tell someone with an SLR camera that they are stuck in the stone age (photographically speaking) and laugh when they show me an absolutely plain "nothing special" picture. 

So stop implying that digital photography is somehow less relevant because you are too fucking cheap to spring for a DSLR body because you bought your SLR just before they went out of style.

Stop telling me that photoshopping is "not real photography" because you cannot afford the program, or you are too impatient to learn it.

I'm not sure if that is why he was so anti-digital, but I know often people are so against something when they either fear it or don't understand it. Digital photography is no less relevant and no less valid than any other kind of photography. And the way he spoke to me about the pictures I take was not called for. I am not the best in the world, nor am I the worst. He was curious about the pictures I took, so I let him see.