You are about as bad as the OP only for different reasons.
This kind if circle reasoning, cliched FUD has been prevalent since the day digital became even tolerable in quality.
It’s under a guise of being sensible, adult and rational.
Here’s the thing:
Professional photography is art, with very few exceptions.
Always has been always will be.
Maybe not high art, or profound art, though sometimes it is?
You sell yourself and folio as a whole, and as sort of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
Good images alone would make everyone a professional.
Very few images are as truly time critical as supposed and often pretended.
Not that long ago, people where fine waiting for development and scan or colour separation.
If you are in the bargain basement and the cost of film, development, and/or scanning and enlarging is truely a factor to the client compared to what you are payed as a professional, then maybe you should consider if you are sitting on a twig that might snap at any moment, and whether this is really your true vocation?
I find that a surprising amount of professionals and certainly a lot of the ones worth keeping an eye on, are using film.
Either they never left and are “holdouts”. Or they are newcomers, that use film as one of their differentiating factors. Either using it actively in their marketing or using it as a trade secret.
I would be inclined to argue that the bulk of paid photo work is not art. It is documentary, and under that umbrella I'm counting product photography, advertising, commercial architectural shoots, events, news, sports photography, wildlife, and landscape that's destined anywhere other than a gallery wall. You're being commissioned to produce a document, not an artwork.
There is certainly an artistic element to it. It helps to have a good eye and a good grip on composition, color theory, and art history.
But at the end of the day, most photographers who are earning a living from it are not producing artwork, are not selling prints through a gallery, are not getting published in Aperture or Black and White, or finding their massive, 2x3m prints hanging in the mansions of wealthy clients.
Mostly they are scraping it out doing weddings, shooting product, working for ad agencies or wire services, etc.
Most working photographers are living on invoices billed to their clients, not grant money, and that engenders a certain accommodation of client preferences and industry standards. Film is neither client preference nor industry standard anymore, and correspondingly it is dead-as-a-doornail for pro work. Make no mistake about this.
I say this as someone who's managed a darkroom, worked for a university visual arts department as a student, and published a single series shot on film.
I have also worked for a newspaper, shot a few things for wire, and I currently work mostly as a digital tech on commercial shoots. You would be laughed out of the building if you tried to take most commercial jobs on film in 2020. Art directors want to see images in real time. Editors want jpgs before the event you're covering is even over. I agree, it's often unnecessary and self important, but hey, that's the industry standard now.
Sure, there are a few niches where one might get away with film (I'm thinking high-end editorial or a documentary project funded by a grant), but the industry of photography is digital. The art world is different. There is a difference between being a working professional photographer and an artist with a camera. Professional artists are using film, sure. Professional photographers - not so much.
To draw a metaphor - most of us are not Eric Ripert. Most of us are more like Anthony Bourdain before he started writing. Not everyone can reinvent cuisine or work in a michelin star place.
We're journeymen or master craftsmen, not artists, and there is a big difference. There's nothing wrong with that. Practicing one's craft honestly is a perfectly fine way to live.
Some days that means shooting a nice editorial project with lots of creative control, or personal work for print sales, and other days you're shooting bath towels on white for a department store for a day rate and a craft services lunch.
Not to kick the hornet's nest too much more, but I suspect a lot of good artwork produced on film is actually done by amateurs, or at least by photographers paying their bills with digital, which frees them from having to worry about overhead and turnaround and client expectations and etc etc. Nothing wrong with that, but that's not the state of the industry.
Anyways, apologies for derailing the thread and if I've come off overly combative. This thread just got me thinking about the work we all do and about the differences (important and manifold) between commercial photography and photography as art, a subject that tends to stir up some deep-seated sentiments for a lot of us.
A few weeks ago, before all this, a colleague and I were going through a stack of my recent darkroom prints and gushing about how well XP-2 prints on B&W paper. He used to use it in 120 occassionally, and we ended up discussing mamiya RZ's, preferred 35mm cameras, and the joys of color wet prints for a while. He worked professionally with RZs, I entered the field once digital had taken over.
We worked all day with a dSLR tethered to a dual-monitor set up.
