Community, "Is extensive post processing expertise a required skill to be a professional photographer of calibre in today's times?" I was reading Joey L (fstoppers.com/fstoppers-sits-down-with-joey-lawrence) and they said he, excels at post processing as well. And I thought perhaps to make your mark, post-processing cannot be ignored, in fact has to be excelled at apart from planning and executing the shots. Thoughts?

@Regmi Post-processing has ALWAYS been an integral part of photography. A lot of photographers have known nothing but the digital age, but long, long, long before a CCD was a twinkling in anyone's eye, people were "processing" film in chemical baths, enlarging photos onto photographic paper, and "processing" photographic papers.

Film processing was not simply some sterile, strait-forward, monotonous series of procedures either...a number of techniques were frequently employed to control exposure, tune photographic paper while it was being exposed, etc.

It doesn't matter if you use digital or film, or some pre-film mechanism like wet-plate collodion...processing photos is as critical a part of the process as framing the shot and pressing the shutter button.

@Regmi So, my thoughts? Being an expert photographer intrinsically means you are an expert at post processing. Simple as that.

@jrista Perfect, thank you!

And let's not forget that a lot of what falls under "post processing" today would happen long before the shutter was pressed in the old days. Even if you just restricted the field to ISO 100 colour print film, I regularly used 4 of them, each with its own characteristic contrast and tonality, and each of them being better-suited to a particular type of photography (at least to my eye).

Artistic photography has always been about using the tools to produce the result you want, not just photocopying what's in front of the lens.

Thanks Stan.

nice way to put it : " photocopying what's in front of the lens "

so the final tally is around 5000 photos and video clips taking around 150GB from the weekend

!

I thought my 15GB from 9 years was excessive

I guess it's probably close to 20GB now actually

@MattJ I'm on 41 gb from the last year

after removing the crud

@MattJ In fairness, I did document pretty much 75% of the artifacts on display in the Smithsonian Natural History museum, about 85% of the artifacts on display in the Air and Space museum and all of the animals that I could spot at the National Zoo

so it was a lot of subjects to take photos of

and I was shooting entirely in RAW on a 24.3 MP camera

with video clips in full HD 24p all I frame which has a data rate of approximately insane

hey

@MattJ :/ i think i am over a TB

@MattJ Wow...15Gb over 9 years is barely a trickle. With bird and wildlife photography, I can fill up a 16Gb card in a matter of a couple of hours, and frequently end up with around 120Gb on a good weekend of bird photography.

My Lightroom library grew to 1.6Tb in a year. ;P

That is approximately a 1000x faster rate of growth than yours. ;D

The funny part is 150GB sounded like a lot to me until I did the math and realized it costs me less than $15