I am totally puzzled by the many people here who are proud of never doing any post processing of their images. They hold up "straight out of camera" as a badge of honor, as though this somehow indicates their excellence as photographers.

I see it quite differently. For me, excellent photographers, or at least good photographic technicians, are those who can turn out an image that most clearly achieves the vision of the person who made it, and which uses the technology available to maximize its presentation.

SOOC is like a stock car. if you keep your stock car tuned and serviced, you can certainly win a race against a similar car that has been neglected and is not firing on all cylinders, but you will never stand a chance against a similar car in which engine, transmission, drive train, suspension, wheels and tires have been modified or replaced with the most technologically advanced custom components, carefully considered and installed.

Today at work we had a little informal basketball game, and I took some pix. It's a pretty high contrast situation, and I was careful to find the best possible exposure. I shot in raw, of course, because I knew that I wanted the maximum potential to play with afterward.

Image #1 is a jpg created automatically from the raw (by Adobe Camera Raw). It's pretty similar to what I would get with a neutral setting in the camera (Nikon D800E). That's about the best you could hope for SOOC.

Image #2 is my personal choice of how I wanted the image to look. I wanted more saturation in the sky and some detail in the darker parts of the image. You may think it overcooked, and maybe you personally would have kept a bit more of the contrast between dark and light. Well, of course it would have been easy to back off a little. That's the beauty of post: YOU get to choose how you want the image to look--you are not at the mercy of the camera's algorithms.

Image #3 is pushed even further than #2. I include it to show just how much latitude one has working with a raw. In fact I could have pushed it even further, but this situation is not particularly high contrast and so it is not needed--but a couple more stops of dynamic range are waiting in the wings to be called upon if necessary.

I'm not saying here that one should not try to achieve the best exposure possible when taking the image--the better the exposure, the more latitude one has later for correction and fine tuning, but within a stop (or even two) either way, a very presentable image can be made, even in a fairly high contrast situation like this one.

Any by the way, such corrections take at most a couple of minutes. Open the image in an editor, make adjustments to three or four parameters, and save. Typically takes me about 30 seconds.

Discussion?