Over at Anti Lomography, a group of film purists are attacking what they deemed as their inferior film counterparts—lomographers who use “old film cameras that are generally of extremely poor quality and overpriced”.
They claim they aren’t anti-digital and support digital photography as one of the best ways to learn photography. But they would later add: “when you get sick of ‘post processing’, buy an old film camera and discover yourself and further discover photography.”
I can’t believe there are still people who believe that film is any more pure than digital. Any self-respecting photographer—film or digital—would spend time post processing their photos. Ansel Adams was not only known as a master in landscape photography, but a master in darkroom techniques.
The only reason why they would imply post processing as bad and inferior to film photography is probably because they’ve been shooting like the lomographers—letting the 1-hour labs do the developing and printing for them.
Sorry, but you missed the point. Or a lot of points, I should say. If you read past the ‘about’ page, you’d see what you’d missed.
For instance, it’s not against post processing per se. It’s about EXCESSIVE postprocessing that takes the ‘photography’ out of, well, photography. It’s about using things like extreme HDR or making people have skins like bronzed rubber vinyl.
“1 hour lab processing”? If you looked at the tags, you’d note that a good number indicate some form of developing reference. In BW. Since when did 1 hour labs run D76 or Rodinal? Would you have that where you are? Many of the photos posted there also originate from prints – some conventional bromides, some alternative prints. And of the scans, many were subjected to some form of post processing- just enough to make them look right, and restore what the machine missed. The machines and software used often don’t render things as how the photographer saw the image. Just enough to put back what was lost. Not as far as making neon sunsets or plastic skins.
But then again, you probably did not see all these, did you?