This primate spends plenty of time in the digital darkroom, more than I spend at the actual events whether I am looking at the best 10% or 1%. I color grade everything and almost always make local adjustments -- I find color graded flower photos are hugely crowd pleasing and for sports a lot of student athletes have the beauty of youth but also really bad acne not just on their face but on their legs and for every event I develop a LUT which handles issues like that not too mention everything from neon-colored sports gear and green foliage that can be too saturated if not entirely out-of-gamut while still keeping the jersey colors recognizable.

My last 3 years of photography really started when I got a "free" inkjet printer and realized it would dry out if I didn't use it regularly and challenged myself to make a print every day and realized it couldn't just be anime girls from danbooru so that program was hungry for images and dragged me kicking and screaming into photography

https://www.behance.net/gallery/232344867/Life-is-Better-Wit...

and as much as people like to bitch about the ink mafia, the performance of digital inkjet printing for the price is off the chart, my materials cost for 13x19 prints is well under $2 a page.

All of this.

I shoot more film today than digital. I like the process more. The shots cost real $, so I'm more thoughtful about what I capture. The cameras[1] are mechanical art and feel good to use. I look forward to the delayed satisfaction due to off-site processing. The results might not be "pixel perfect" but photography rarely is... I prefer the slightly less perfect aesthetic - the grain, the slight miss on color, etc.

But, I also shoot Polaroid, so I might just be a hipster who lacks self-awareness. ;)

1 - Olympus 35DC, Olympus 35RD, and Canon Demi EE-17 for film. Olympus E-M5 and Pen E-P5 for mirrorless. Polaroid Go for instant.

I don't spend anytime post-processing or editing apart from occasional cropping. Film gives me a better baseline for that than digital does, at least for what I want and I just prefer the process. Digital encourages a workflow thats a lot more attached to post and being back at my computer rather than just out taking photos.

To be fair, film photography has itself always been, "Monkey with a trust fund on a typewriter." Even with those that are actually technically adept, the skill/luck balance is far less venerable than with actual artists like painters and sculptors and CG wranglers.

> To be fair, film photography has itself always been, "Monkey with a trust fund on a typewriter."

As a GenXer who lived through the transition, and worked a photo-processing job for a couple of years, I disagree. There were plenty of people taking meaningful—though perhaps not artistic—photos with point and shoot and even disposable cameras.

Regular people taking photos of birthdays, weddings, funerals, baptisms, vacations, retirements, etc. I processed and colour corrected tens of thousands of photos and the majority of them had people smiling, laughing, crying, etc, and were put in photobooks: some to never to be seen again, or perhaps looked when someone died when memories for a photo slideshow were desired.