Just Learn to Shoot & Edit RAW (say the gatekeepers)
There’s a frustrating comment I receive every now and then. It’s been going on for years and years—pretty much since I started making Film Simulation Recipes—and it continues to this very day. It goes something like this: “If you just learned to edit RAW, you wouldn’t need Recipes.” It can be said many different ways, but that’s always the gist of it. Sometimes it’s stated a bit nicer with a beating around the bush, and sometimes it’s said more harshly, occasionally with swearing. I’ve even been told once that I’m doing much harm to photography. Someone even threatened me physically, should they ever see me on the streets.
All of that is crazy wild. It’s bananas. Did Edwin Land get this reaction with the Polaroid? Maybe, I don’t know. It just seems like a weird response to someone else’s personal workflow choice. It’s gatekeeping.
Gatekeeping, which says that only photography done the “right” way is correct and all other methods are incorrect, is a big problem. To be clear: there’s no right or wrong way to do photography, only whatever works for you personally. Anybody who says otherwise is flat out wrong, and couldn’t be more wrong. But there are, unfortunately, many people who will tell you that photography must be done a certain way or else it’s less legitimate. There are a several reasons why people gate keep, so let’s look at some.
Photography is deeply personal, and many people tie their identity to how “skilled” they think they are. When someone else succeeds with a different method—shooting JPEGs, iPhone photography, etc.—it threatens the fragile belief that their way is the only legitimate path. It’s a defensive shield: If you do it differently and are successful, then my choices—and hence myself—might be less special.
Kind of similarly, people who learn a lot can mistake knowledge for superiority. You’re doing it wrong is a shortcut to feeling important. Unfortunately, this kills community. You see it all over the place in forums and comment sections of many websites. This is also used by trolls, who may think they’re knowledgable while oftentimes being quite ignorant.
Photography has a long, technical history. Many photographers were taught rigid rules, such as shoot RAW, use full frame, manual-mode is the only real mode, rule-of-thirds, sunny 16, and many, many more. These types of rules evolve over decades, but they always seem to exist. They serve a purpose: give structure to those early in their journey; however, over time, these types of rules tend to harden into what some believe to be absolute truths. Instead of guidelines that helped for a time, they become laws that must be followed. But, remember, in art rules are meant to be broken.
Photography used to be expensive, slow, and technical, which meant that only some people were photographers, and most were not. Now everyone has a camera in their pocket, and everybody’s making pictures. For some, that democratization feels like a loss of status. Gatekeeping is a way of preserving a hierarchy that no longer naturally exists. I’m a real photographer because I do it this way, and you’re not because you don’t. It’s a game of king-of-the-hill, except nobody else is playing.
Some photographers confuse process with vision. They think creativity comes from the mechanical steps—RAW workflow, layers and curves, editing rituals—rather than from seeing the world in a certain way. When someone simplifies the process, it feels like “cheating” to them. In the end, what matters is if the photo fulfills the photographer’s vision, not what specific steps it took to get there.
Gatekeeping in photography is almost always born from fear—fear of losing relevance, fear of being wrong, fear of being overshadowed, fear of loss of control, fear of competition, etc.. Creativity, on the other hand, comes from curiosity, play, and the freedom to break rules—rules that gatekeepers cling to as if they define the medium.
Getting back to the original statement that inspired this post—if I just learned to edit RAW—well, I shot and edited RAW for years. There are several pictures I’ve included in this article from that era of my photography when I did shoot and edit RAW. I know how to do it, I just don’t enjoy it, so I no longer choose to do it. I don’t personally find any fulfillment in sitting at a computer for hours making all sorts of various adjustments to my pictures. After doing it for years, I realized that it’s just not for me. And that’s ok. There’s no right or wrong way to do photography. I don’t feel that my photography suffers from a lack of RAW editing; actually, I feel that the restraint produces a more authentic result, which I’m quite pleased with.
Invariably, someone will drag Ansel Adams into this argument. Adams spent hours in the darkroom developing film and printing enlargements, with masterful dodging and burning. That’s how photography should be done, except now it’s Lightroom and not a darkroom. All of this ignores Adams’ love for Polaroid photography, which he called one-step photography. Typically, the first step is image capture, and the second is image development, but Polaroids only required the first step (hence, one-step photography). Adams wrote, “The effect of one-step processing on both amateur and professional creative photography has been revolutionary.” One of his well-known Yosemite pictures was captured on a Polaroid, and most who view it are unaware. He wrote a whole book about this topic. Using Film Simulation Recipes is a type of one-step photography, and it can indeed be revolutionary.
Anyway, just because someone chooses to shoot JPEGs on their Fujifilm camera with Film Simulation Recipes does not mean they don’t know how to edit a RAW file. And even if they don’t, that doesn’t make them any less of a photographer. It’s not how you arrive at the destination, it’s the destination itself—the photograph—that matters, and whether or not it fulfills the vision of the photographer.
