Since I do a lot of work in Terminal and find it quicker to process files on the command line for some things so I need to get the path to a file for passing as an argument to Unix commands. It's not obvious at all how to do this from Finder. You can have Finder show the path but there's no way to copy it! Right-clicking only shows the parent directories in order to quickly navigate but not to copy (unlike Windows Explorer where you can access the path like a browser URL).
If you right click a file and select 'Get Info' you will see in the 'Where' section the parent folders are...