That's a ridiculous, snobbish, and prescriptive view. Did the person also think the world was flat by any chance?
Once scanned... it's a digital image, and you treat it essentially like any other digital file. You do what's appropriate for the work.
Images have always been manipulated.. heavily. You'd be amazed what Ansel Adams did to his images, and he's the archetypal Master in his field. He just didn't use a computer.. that's all... but they were massively altered from reality.
Many of these film purists were never actually active when film was a big deal anyway... they're just jumping on an anti-culture bandwagon. Don't get me started on the Lomo/Lubitel crowd either
Film.. digital.... all the same thing really... just a recording medium that captures a focused image. I could even argue, and academically justify saying that a film image IS digital
Exposed silver halide crystals in development are turned into silver, and non-exposed crystals are removed in the fixing process, resulting in a collection, or clumps of black “grains” on a clear negative base. Therefore the entire image is not continuous in tone as many would have us believe at all. It is in fact, made up exclusively from black and white, with no intermediate tones. The appearance of continuity, like the digital image, is a result of these grains being so small, and so plentiful, that the eye can not resolve them individually, so an area of dense crystals appears very dark, or black, an area where the crystals are more evenly spread appears grey, and an area where there are few appears white, or very light grey. In essence, a black and white negative
is a digital image, in exactly the same way an electronically derived image is. The difference that an analogue image has these crystals distributed randomly, whereas the digital image’s pixels are uniform, and arranged in a grid. As Graham Saxby writes,
“Although silver metal is shiny, the texture of the grains causes the light to be reflected back and forth until it has all been absorbed, so the grains look black. On a microscopic scale, therefore, a photographic image is a binary device: Light either passes unimpeded or is blocked completely. However, as the grains are in general too small to be seen with the unaided eye, the image appears in varying shades of grey, depending on the number of grains in a given area” (Graham Saxby, 2002. The Science of Imaging: An Introduction, p. 63)
So essentially.... such distinctions between what you should, and shouldn't do with film are just so much hot air.
...that was my first attempt at scanning.... and it has taken me a while to work out how to use the scanner.
