No easy answers, continued. At this point in the technological history of the human race, if you are "serious" about photography, you will have to contend with complex and sometimes heavy cameras, a variety of lenses, solid tripod gear, and some flash / lighting equipment. Concerning bird photography, there is a somewhat affordable lens on the market, the Tamron 150-600mm. Supertelephoto lenses manufactured by the major players (Canon, Nikon, Sony, etc.) are unaffordable for the vast majority of people.
I have settled for the mid-point DSLR cameras (less than perfect, but okay) affordable lenses and flash / light equipment / studio gear. I have a good photography library. I accept that if I want to expose / post-process an image and save it on my computer and perhaps share it with a few family members and friends, that achieving that goal is not going to be a "walk in the park".
Since I enjoy capturing landscape images, I susbcribed to the Dave Morrow Photography website. Among his offerings is a package for photo editing for landcape and outdoor photography. That series of video tutorials along with Adobe's user manuals for Lightroom, Bridge and Photoshop are what I am presently working with to tackle the daunting task of learning post processing. Adobe Creative Cloud Photography Suite is the "gold standard" in post processing. No matter how intimidating it may be, I intend to "stick with it" and learn how to use it to my advantage. I have followed Dave Morrow's organizational and editing procedures. If I want to "keep it simple", I can import my images into Lightroom, move them into Bridge and finally open them in Adobe Camera Raw and do my "global" adjustments there. If the image would require additional refining, I could then opt to open it into Photoshop and create layer masks to edit specific portions of the image, etc. Finally, I can sharpen the image and save it back to a folder where I save my final images. Just to be able to use Adobe Camera Raw and do some basic adjustments is sometimes enough just to give a picture that "extra oomph" that it needs.
So, it would be nice if the human race were more advanced in the engineering / design / production of photography gear, but we are where we are.
Just look back at the history of photography. What kind of complicated, heavy gear did Ansel Adams and Edward Weston have to carry around? How did they "develop" their images from a "huge" large format negative? How about the need for a "dark room", toxic chemicals, ideal temperatures, etc. How many years has it taken to get from there to the present?
Therefore, I accept where we are. I will never live to see truly featherweight cameras, "nano" lenses, etc. I work with what I have. So, we may all be dealing with frustrations and impatience, wishing for something better - faster than it can even be "imagined" let alone designed and engineered.
So, we can be impatient and frustrated or we can work with what we have and look to the past to what our photography predecessors had to endure to produce the images they did. What if they were impatient? Look at some of the early photography masters work - even before color, and think about what they tolerated because they wanted a great photograph. Then think about where we are in the year 2019, and look what we can do now . . .
