Why does it take so long to see the photographs you just took, you are a professional? After all I took some photos too and I have all ready posted ALL of mine to Facebook and my blog.
As a professional I try to capture moments in time that are special and memorable, in order to do this I may make several hundred if not thousands of exposures during an event. Making the exposures is the easy part of the process and once that is finished the real work begins. The goal is to tell a story of the event with photos that excite the viewer, but not overwhelm them to the point where they get bored and walk away.
The editing process begins, first you have to import all the images that you created into your image editing program. Now you have to find just the right ones (kinda like looking for the needle in the hay stack). The process of elimination begins, is this image technically good (exposure, lighting and composition)? If so it is rated if not it is rejected.
Each image is optimized for exposure and color corrected to look its absolute best. Again these images are rated and the cream moves along to the next step.
Since most of our work now gets posted online in one way or another we need to make sure that one the image can be found by search engines, and that we (photographers) are properly credited for creating the imagery. In this step keywords and metadata are added to the file before it goes on line..
Now that the editing process is finished how are the images going to be shown to the client? Paper or on line, either process will take some time and has some variables that we have no control over. Did the lab run out of paper are they busy? Is the internet slow, bad connection? Sometimes things just go wrong.
The images will be available it is the end of a sometimes complicate process that can be interrupted by life.
