Originally posted by filmmaster makes me MORE educated and skilled in basic photography
Perhaps it's just that with our modern tools these days, getting well metered shots is much closer to automatic and/or easy. Where you are skilled with a little light meter needle, nowadays people view a histogram and adjust settings till the right side has no gap and no compression. Or just review the image and decide for themselves if it's bright enough. I believe the skills and education you're talking about are still required, they're just handled differently than they used to be, and perhaps a fair bit easier.
Originally posted by turbo_bird and what I got back from them was what I got.
Yes, and you just hoped that the operator at the lab who wound up working on your roll was 'intelligent!'
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There is also the fact (and this applies to both points) that, with digital, one has essentially unlimited trials and errors, whereas with film it took so long and used up actual physical resources to make a try and detect an error.
If we review a shot on our camera's screen and see it's underexposed, we can shoot again with the subject still in front of the lens and the light still more or less the same. If we move a slider in our processing software and it makes the image look like trash, we can hit ctrl-Z and try a different value or parameter, without wasting chemicals or paper.
These are luxuries nobody had back in the day. That necessarily changes the way one learns how to make good images.