It's gone vary quiet.
The "quietness" was in part due to my taking the time to consider if a response was appropriate, and if so what it should be.
I of course recognise that APUG is intended for analog photography users, as the title says. It has seemed in the past that my presence as a declared film capture/digital output worker was accepted, this even seemed the case at last autumn's APUG meeting, which I attended.
However, it seems the position has changed, primarily due to the strong opinions of one individual. Two side issues immediately come to mind:
1) If analog wet-process images are clearly superior, why should anyone fear having their images of this kind placed side by side with digital? and
2) Who exactly is empowered to define APUG policy?
but I shall leave these to one side and proceed to what I feel is the main question.
I have made efforts, through reading past postings, to understand the thinking of the individual in question. It would seem that, disappointed by his own efforts at digital printing a few years ago, he has concluded that all digital prints at all times and by all photographers are automatically garbage. This, to my mind, is a rather wild extrapolation, since it firstly dismisses in a very arrogant und above all uninformed way the decision of thousands of professionals world-wide, including myself, who are intimately aware of the pros and cons of both analog and digital technology and highly skilled in both but prefer the latter, and secondly by implication suggests that the individual's own work embodies the opposite of digital mediocrity, namely analog excellence, whereas my experience has been that this work struggles and fails in conceptual and emotional terms to rise above the level of threadbare cliché, while on a technical level in no way displaying the superlative skill level in analog printing which the individual himself clearly believes he possesses.
Sorry to be so direct, but if I attend a gathering of photographers, I am looking for exciting visual ideas and bold personal statements, hopefully something new that I haven't seen before - blinkered bigotry is just not my thing. I have accordingly decided not to attend any further APUG gatherings, and it would not take too many more postings along the lines of "digital imaging = masturbation" and the like for me to leave APUG completely, notwithstanding that I find certain elements interesting and informative.
Regards,
David