That's a very contemptuous thing to say.

Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable, they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.

I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.

Totally agree!

Photography for me is about the physical and optical side of things. Choosing a lens for a situation, framing the shot, aperture, shutter, etc.

When I switched to digital I was seduced by post-processing, partly as a substitute for the look I could achieve with different films, but mostly I suspect because all those sliders and numbers and graphs are naturally attractive to a certain type of person :)

I eventually pretty much stopped taking photos.

Changing my workflow from post processing RAW photos (and barely ever looking at them again) to using in-camera JPEGs that I can immediately share, print, or whatever was enough to start me taking photos again regularly as a hobby.

More unexpectedly, in addition to the obvious time saving of removing the post processing step (aside from occasional cropping), the satisfaction benefit of the immediacy with which I can now print, share, display, etc. my favourite photos has been huge. It’s so much more rewarding getting photos right after you took them and actually doing something with them!

Now I’m not even sure I’d call all that digital image processing “photography”. Sure, it’s an art in its own right, and one some photographers enjoy, but the essence of photography lies somewhere else. I’d encourage everyone to try a camera with decent in camera JPEG production. You can always shoot Raw+JPEG if you’re scared to go full cold turkey.

> That's a very contemptuous thing to say.

I really don't think it is.

When I pick up a camera, my intent is one of two things: the experience of photography itself, or the best quality I can reasonably obtain. Neither of those goals are attained with a smartphone.

Every other time I take a photo, it's with a smartphone. It's easily good enough for the vast majority of use cases.

> Even if one is using in-camera JPEG and does not want to spend 1hr/picture in Darktable,

That's... absurd. Granted I lean toward a more "street photography" style, but it's exceptionally rare that I spend more then ~30s on a photo in Lightroom. Most of that time is spent cropping. White balance, exposure correction, etc. are all done in bulk.

> they can still play with many more objectives, exposure, shutter time, physical zoom, aperture, etc.

Sure - and why wouldn't you want to play with RAW as well? It's not like the profile the camera would have used isn't embedded in the RAW anyhow.

> I'd even go the other way around: if you just bought a camera, just use in-camera JPEGs for the first months and familiarize yourself with all the rest (positioning, framing, understanding your camera settings, etc.) before jumping into digital development.

I don't disagree with this at all. Of course there are edge cases; that's why I said "probably".

To put it another way: if you're shooting JPEGs regularly, you're almost certainly not doing it for the craft. There are very few reasons I can think of to choose a traditional camera if you're not going to take advantage of the improvements in ISO and dynamic range that it offers - and those are two things you give up[0] shooting JPEG.

0: You give up ISO in that you are discarding much of the information that you could use to push/pull process, which is very often preferable to very high ISO.

ETA: I just looked it up. In 2024, I kept 767 photos from my iPhone and 1,900 from my cameras. That includes multiple performances of my wife's dance studio, so the latter is heavily skewed by that. Excluding those, I kept 376. In other words, I appear to be taking my own advice here.