SOOC pulled me back into Photography

What is SOOC (I didn’t know it, till few weeks ago)?

SOOC is the acronym for Straight Out Of Camera which means that the pictures are not processed after being uploaded from the camera.

Until few years ago, enthusiast and professional photographers was shooting exclusively in RAW format and processing the file with photo editing software in order to obtain an image file.

In fact, RAW files are not images but just the data coming out from the camera sensors without any processing and therefore they allow an extremely wide range of control and modifications prior becoming an image.

At the beginning, only high-level cameras had the possibility to shoot RAW and so the camera model became a way to recognise serious photographers for casual ones.

I have been thought that time and I became a RAW fundamentalist: if it was not RAW, it was not photography.

I have never been a lover of post-processing, I was getting easily bored by the fine adjustments of all the parameters and so my pictures maybe didn’t benefit much from that. But having the freedom to do almost anything was what it mattered.

At that time, something like SOOC would have been considered as an offence to the art of digital photography.

But later, maybe because of the continue increasing of adjustment possibilities and camera performances, I had a sort of rejection for all the digital photography world and associated high tech.

So, I ended up filling my cabinet with analogue rolls of any size and type and analogue cameras, mainly toy cameras. I became a Lomography fundamentalist. For a while.

After that, I simply stopped with photography and for years, I became just someone who lets the mobile phone taking some pictures, as the most of us.

Till recently, when in a cold day of December, out of nowhere I had the urge to pick up photography again. In the recent years, there has been nothing in my daily life that could even remotely trigger a renewed interest in photography but still it all came back.

I started looking online to see how the digital photography evolved, beside Instagram, still unsure about this urge of mine but when I discovered the SOOC, I had no doubt. I was back into photography.

SOOC is what I missed for so many years, the bridge between the digital and analogue photography which removed the focus from PC screens and editing software to bring it behind the camera without the limitation of films rolls.

Fujifim has been a pioneer on digital film simulation and consequently on SOOC and I could not do other than get me a new Fujufilm camera for Christmas and step back into photography with a different vision than ever before.