> Most wedding photographers aren't using film.
They were using film “a long time ago”. Wedding photographers have only been shooting digital for 20 years or so.
Early digital had a somewhat poor dynamic range. It’s gotten better, but it was really rough in the early days.
> If you know how to use your equipment you shouldn't have any problem taking photos of people of any skin color, not even the lightest person next to the darkest.
This statement seems so obviously and fundamentally wrong that I must be missing something. I meet enough photographers that know how to use their equipment, but have never taken a decent photograph in their life, except one or two exceptions which appear to be accidents. This seems like a very natural and understandable thing to me—there’s a lot to painting besides understanding how to use brushes and paint, and there’s a lot to building a house besides knowing how to use a nailgun and circular saw. There’s a lot more to programming than knowing how to use your compiler.
Maybe I’m missing the meaning here, because it doesn’t make any sense to me.
> These days you shoot in raw with a digital camera, vary the exposure if needed, and set the white balance as needed when editing.
That’s the first week of photography 101. Have you taken more advanced photography courses? Have you ever taken a photograph of a dark-skinned subject, wearing a pure white dress, and then printed it out? My personal experience is, that once you print your photos out (which is normal for wedding photos), and get some people with an experienced eye to look at them and give them a critique, you start to develop an appreciation for how understanding your equipment & process is just the barrier for entry to the field, and it makes you a novice.
Let me tell you—it is not trivial to make the picture show a flattering image of both the dark skin, and the white dress, with the delicate details in both. You need to know a lot more than just how to use your equipment. It is especially difficult if you are not in control of the lighting.
The raw workflow is nice, but your raw file goes through a lot of processing to turn into a viewable image, and many of the stock presets are modeled after the way film does it. You’re not really escaping the problem, in any sense, by using raw.