so, just to add a view opinions to this thread, not really directed at any of the above comments specifically:
i am a graphic designer who uses a lot of photography in my work, mostly by using photography as a structural base for my design work, as opposed to representational "stock" type images.
i do a lot of work with my mentor and friend who is, amongst other things, a professional photographer and has been since the 70's. he has a pristine white 1000sq ft photo studio with the full shebang of lighting, booms, floods, flash kits, slaves, etc... not to mention a dozen canon L lenses to go with his 1ds mark ii, which he just upped to a mark iii last week. he has serious amounts of gear, 10's, hell maybe 100's of thousands of dollars worth. his photos come in as RAW files that are then converted to TIFF in Capture One, and further edited, color corrected, cleaned up, etc in photoshop. he gets paid very well to work onsite as well as in his studio and his work has been in many books, magazine covers, annual reports, etc.. for big named clients (that i will not name here due to various NDAs). this guy is a pro and has been for 30+ years.
3 points:
1. when i first saw his studio a few years ago, my jaw dropped at all the stuff he has. he looked up with a grin and said "don't get too impressed. all that really matters is how the light goes through the lens. all this stuff just helps me get the light to do what i want."
2. we were shooting some flat art for my portfolio and he made some comment about how something was not shooting perfectly and i said "does it matter? just photoshop it!" he said "photoshop does not make taking photographs any easier. just cheaper, faster and safer. but it is just as much a pain in the ass as a darkroom if you take crappy photos."
3. i was with him at a shoot for a bunch of stuff for a major office furniture manufacturer. i watched him take 12 hours to get 2 shots. literally 12 hours, literally 2 shots. he called that a "productive day." thats when i really understood that photography is about what happens up to and including light hitting the film (or sensor), not about how much adjustment you need to do in the darkroom or in photoshop. i asked him about HDR, and post processing, and all that stuff and he always says "start with garbage, end with garbage."
so.
2 more things.
1. what i think the issue with a lot of "purists" who are haters of photoshop is the ease of entry and simple accessibility. back in the day you had to buy a good camera, buy film, buy lights, buy tripods, have a darkroom, buy chemistry, buy paper, buy gear, spend a lot of time working in the darkroom, testing and retesting, and so on and so on. now, any 13 year old with a ripped copy of photoshop he got from a torrent can call himself a "photographer." hell, you don't even really need a camera anymore. this same argument goes around and around in the graphic design world too; if anyone can get a copy of indesign, then anyone can be a designer.
let me make this perfectly clear: technology does not equal talent.
2. i use a DSLR and medium format film cameras reularly.
personally, i prefer film. i prefer it for the reasons a lot of people hate it; i can use the innate unpredictability of an analog medium (relative to a digital one) to my advantage, and i do so as often as i can. to me, the process of getting light to film to negative to print feels better than light to CMOS to pixel to printer. its a personal preference that i can in no way make a quantifiable justification of.
i also use digital often, for relative ease of iteration - its very easy to shoot 500 exposures digitally, its much harder (and more expensive) to do it in film. in my world, both have their place, and both have advantages and disadvantages.
