Historgrams aren't used only for assessing digital photographs. FWIW see: [www.google.com] and for digital photograps in particular: [www.luminous-landscape.com]

It's very difficult to take good pictures, b&w or color, on bright sunny days because of the large contrast gradient between the shadowed and dark areas of scenes as compared to the lighter areas like the sky, things quite common in railroad photography. Darius Kinsey discovered this early on and made a point of taking his logging rr photographs in the forests on overcast days, which have much less contrast gradient. This is because your eye adjusts to the various gradients of different areas of a scene as your eye scans what your looking at. They eye scans the scene, sort of similarly to the way a TV picture is painted on the screen, and the brain then pastes the information into a comprehensible picture.

Photographic emulsions and CCD devices can't do any of this. What they record is an overall average of the whole scene. When you look at the resulting photograph, you're looking an approixmation, not the original scene. Your eye can't make any adjustmens for the darker areas because the visual information your eye would use to compensate for in the original hasn't been recorded by the emulsion or CCD device.

My opinion is that those moderators of that board are being a bit a**l retentive. It could revolve around one's taste in contrast, density, color saturation, etc. My prefrences for color saturation and hue tend toward the pastel, but many people like brilliant and saturated colors (which Kodachrome, Ektachrome, and Kodacolor excell at). Drew has different tastes than mine, but that's not the point. Besides, when I download pictures and feel the colors are too saturated and/or the contrast range is off, I use my graphics program to change them to my tastes (the png format saves more information about an image than jpg does -- jpg is quite "lossy").