Here's a straight scan from film of my dog. Just look at those realistic colors and all that latitude! no post processing here at all, just a straight mini lab scan and resizing for upload.
---------- Post added 05-21-15 at 10:54 AM ----------
Originally posted by Cuthbert
analogical
4) I don't understand why you think scanners have a mind of their own and they "decide" to improve the pics, for the Boots personnel, they are a pharmacy and what they told me is that they just insert the roll into the machine and they don't anything to them because they don't have a clue on how to change the settings...I believe them.
Have you seen how cool this Transform is? Even if the pic has been taken with some livid overcast winter light it's better than Michael Bay's, and you guess why? Because of course it's physical and not CGI!
P.S. Hopefully I haven't already posted it here, however it's taken with my LX, M200 f4 wide open and Portra 160.
4). Because scanners do have a mind of their own I.e. their default programming that presumably a group of real engineers and probably a few photographers somewhere in Japan came up with so that the pimply faced teenager that gets to run the scanner in some backwater drug store can load in film and get acceptable enough results for the masses wanting a set of 24-36 $0.13ea 4x6 digital color prints from their vacation.
They also built in calibration tools to allow the scanner, should he or she decide to become proficient at what they do or should the machine find itself at a decent lab that cares, to be adjusted for various film stocks and photographic issues such as low contrast, color balances, exposure problems, and more. You know, everything you do with a home scanner or Adobe Camera Raw with RAW files to make the images look their best.
As far as your transformer goes, it looks like what it is: a snapshot of a statue on decent film with a good camera. You're sounding a lot like Ken Rockwell in your approach and thoughts on photography...
Even if you choose to post and print from negatives that you have not altered, it does not mean that they have not been 'post processed'. The negative was scanned, inverted, white balanced, and adjusted by the scanner before it was written to a cd for you to post online or before it spit out a cheap digital print. Taking a straight scan like that is akin to using straight jpegs and relying on the cameras own default internal processing over shooting RAW.
Ive also found it usually means the person is either scared of or confounded by Lightroom or photoshop. I've gotten lucky and had some really nice jpegs over the years, but more often than not there's a better image waiting in the raw file for me to extract. Not because I missed exposure or needing to add a giant flying alien or remove a person (though I have clone stamped out distracting objects in backgrounds and will happily remove all too frequent dust spots) but because the default image didn't match what I remember seeing or wanted to show when I took the photo.
I don't take offense to people who can't be bothered to put a little time in to their images, but I do find it odd that there are so many people like yourself who are so put off by the notion of creating a good photograph (and *all* good photographs are created, be it from a digital file, a negative, or a slide) that they dismiss the process altogether and then have the nerve to shout at the top of their lungs against it. "But it's not straight out of the camera!" Is double speak for "I don't want to work that hard" and it usually shows in the shots...