ALL dSLRs can be set to mimic an old film camera. Use a fixed ISO, in full manual mode, with no automatic focus. Set the meter to center-weighted averaging, or use a hand-held meter. Suddenly, you have a the equivalent of a Canon or Nikon from the 1960s — 1970s.

To mimic slide photography, record JPEGs. To mimic a particular slide film, adjust the menu settings to produce the look you like. Oh, you can use the white balance and hue controls to match the color of the light source to the camera's sensor, if you don't have that bag of color correction filters we used to carry.

To mimic B&W or color negative photography, however, you will need to record raw files at the camera and post-process them as you would in your own darkroom or at a photo lab. (JPEGs have the latitude of slide film. Raw files have a latitude that approaches that of negative films.)

It may surprise you that there is a select group of professionals who work this way on occasion. We grew up with film. Our old habits are still useful — on occasion. Of course, we don't use our gear that way very often, because the new tools are too good NOT to use! They open up possibilities we never had with film.

Having spent most of my career in the pro lab industry, I can tell you that many professional portrait photographers FREAKED OUT when digital imaging came of age. They were used to LABS doing all of their processing and printing, including color and density correction. Suddenly THEY were responsible for getting everything right at the camera as JPEGs, OR doing post-processing of raw files and creating perfect JPEGs for the lab, on THEIR computers. (Most had no computers, or they had wimpy PCs that were too old to run post-processing software, or they had cheap, uncalibrated monitors.)

Because pro portrait labs don't handle raw files (they certainly didn't in 2000-2005 when I managed our digital production departments), suddenly our customers and employees on the retail side had to learn precise exposure control, precise white balance, lighting contrast control, and that discipline at the camera that only 'chrome users truly knew. The old Kodak Vericolor and Portra films had pretty extreme latitude! We could scan and make salable prints from two stops under-exposure to almost three stops over-exposure of those films. JPEG latitude is about +0.33 stop, –0.67 stop. Raw latitude can be around +/– two stops, so the old film users had to choose what to learn!

Confronted with that choice, some of those guys and ladies reacted like rats in a Skinner box that had just pressed a button and received an electric shock to their feet (after pressing the same button for months to receive food). (In one of B.F. Skinner's behavioral conditioning experiments, the rats ran to a corner of the cage, shook in shock, perhaps tried the button a few more times, then huddled in the corner convulsing until death.)

In other words, some old film photographers ran to the nearest bar and got very drunk! When they woke up the next morning, many of them quit. They had no computer skills. They knew nothing of electronics. They really knew nothing about precise lighting control, exposure control, contrast control, color management, or any of the other parameters TOP pros and well-educated amateurs know and control daily. They discarded themselves, just like our film editors, film inspectors, optical printer operators... and others we had warned — nearly a decade earlier — that the change was coming. We had offered to send them to school FOR FREE to learn the computer! Out of several hundred, FIVE took us up on that offer.

One guy I tried to train for digital portraiture took my classes twice. Then he went home, sold his business, had a complete nervous breakdown, and entered a mental hospital for a while. He could not handle the change! That was an extreme case, but I'm sure there were milder but similar reactions. We had about 340 retail school photographers, over 1000 professional finishing customers and about 100 school portrait dealers. Many of our retail territories experienced 60% to 80% staff turnover. Our school portrait dealers did, too. Some of the "mom and pop" studio customers retired, switched to dying film labs, or sold their studios.

I have long suspected that many photographers who express "film purity" are really hiding their insecurity about learning new technical skills. I do get that. Learning to use a computer when you may have grown up thinking the only people who type are secretaries (a paradigm of the post-WWII, pre-PC era) would pre-dispose one to ignorance of all things computing. We had scores of such people in the lab.

My old boss from the early 1980s was one of those people. I loved that guy. I watched him struggle to learn graphics apps on the Mac in the late 1990s before he retired. I gave Ralph an A for effort. He finally did learn his way around the computer, but never could really type.

Another reason folks continue using film is that digital photography is EXPENSIVE. You may not need film, but you need the computer, software, monitor, color management tools, digital printer... in addition to a camera that will be obsolete in three to seven years. Then, you need the skills, knowledge, and training to use it all...

With an all-film workflow, you just buy consumables.

So (again), I'll conclude with this. I won't knock analog photography (I did it from 1960 as a five-year-old kid until 2005 when I loaded my last roll of slide film), if others won't knock digital photography. I don't see one as less valid than the other. A good photographer can make great images with either medium.

I do find digital a LOT easier, more precise, and more fun... when I have proper tools. But I WAS lucky — to learn to type at age 8, to have an Apple IIe for programming slide shows and writing scripts back in the 1980s, and to have a front row seat to the digital revolution, via my job. Those experiences made the difference for me.

All images are "post-processed." It's just that some of them are post-processed from raw data in the camera, and some are processed later, on a computer.

The camera has a wide array of parametric tools you can set before exposure that affect the processing done immediately after exposure. The tools are much less granular and precise than tools available in post-processing software, but they are quite useful. In some situations, they are all that you might need.

Some cameras even let you record a raw image, then adjust the look of it with the menu settings on the camera, before saving a copy as a JPEG.

So really, what does Straight Out Of Camera even mean????????

Raw data is not an image. Raw FILES contain processed JPEG thumbnail previews we can see. So EVERY photograph we see is processed. To see an unprocessed image, you have to be looking at the ground glass of a view camera before the film pack is inserted. Even the EVF image on a digital camera is processed...

All images are "post-processed." It's just that some of them are post-processed from raw data in the camera, and some are processed later, on a computer.

The camera has a wide array of parametric tools you can set before exposure that affect the processing done immediately after exposure. The tools are much less granular and precise than tools available in post-processing software, but they are quite useful. In some situations, they are all that you might need.

Some cameras even let you record a raw image, then adjust the look of it with the menu settings on the camera, before saving a copy as a JPEG.

So really, what does Straight Out Of Camera even mean????????

Raw data is not an image. Raw FILES contain processed JPEG thumbnail previews we can see. So EVERY photograph we see is processed. To see an unprocessed image, you have to be looking at the ground glass of a view camera before the film pack is inserted. Even the EVF image on a digital camera is processed...

All images are "post-processed." It's just that some of them are post-processed from raw data in the camera, and some are processed later, on a computer.

The camera has a wide array of parametric tools you can set before exposure that affect the processing done immediately after exposure. The tools are much less granular and precise than tools available in post-processing software, but they are quite useful. In some situations, they are all that you might need.

Some cameras even let you record a raw image, then adjust the look of it with the menu settings on the camera, before saving a copy as a JPEG.

So really, what does Straight Out Of Camera even mean????????

Raw data is not an image. Raw FILES contain processed JPEG thumbnail previews we can see. So EVERY photograph we see is processed. To see an unprocessed image, you have to be looking at the ground glass of a view camera before the film pack is inserted. Even the EVF image on a digital camera is processed...