How many pictures do you take, how many do you keep?

[olli]

I'm curious about the two questions in the title. I generally don't take a lot of pictures when I'm out with my camera, but in the last two years I've consciously aimed to take more. Previously I might have taken 50-60 shots on a photowalk, while now I might take 150-200. On a recent five day visit to another part of Taiwan I took 900 in total. (I realise that these are still quite small numbers compared to some photographers).

I've now reduced the 900 from the recent trip to 98 - around 11% (though over time I might trim a few more). I think this is probably close to my overall average. Some days I keep more - maybe up to 25% - some days less, and somedays none at all.

So I'd be interested in knowing how any of you compare. How many photos do you take on a shoot or in a month or a year and how many do you keep?

 

[2SHOES]

I take probably 2-5K per month, depending on the month and how good I feel, and I technically keep all of them. You wouldn't believe how many I've gone back and edited again, with some new thing I've learned where I was able to save what I thought was a bad photo, by editing it properly. I have an external drive everything gets saved onto, and then I keep the ones I've edited on my computer, with a backup to a second SSD.

I do want to clarify here, a lot of those are from using the High Speed Photo options of birds, and other wildlife, or race cars. Sometimes I go to a racetrack and I'll leave with 4,000 photos in a matter of a few hours.

 

[TNcasual]

Yesterday morning I stopped at three locations. I shot roughly 100 shots and felt around 25 were good enough to keep and 15 good enough to share. That's about normal for me.

 

[rayvonn]

Yesterday morning I stopped at three locations. I shot roughly 100 shots and felt around 25 were good enough to keep and 15 good enough to share. That's about normal for me.

+1

 

[William Lewis]

I got my M 240 in May 2021 and have made 4,700 images since then. Divided by 22 months you can say an average of 215/month.

In the directory I put my post processed keepers, there are 618 images this morning.

28/month. Not quite one a day. Actually a far higher percentage of a lower total number of images taken than I expected.

 

[olli]

I got my M 240 in May 2001 and have made 4,700 images since then. Divided by 22 months you can say an average of 215/month.

In the directory I put my post processed keepers, there are 618 images this morning.

28/month. Not quite one a day. Actually a far higher percentage of a lower total number of images taken than I expected.

I'm guessing that's May 2021?

 

[William Lewis]

I'm guessing that's May 2021?

Yup/Do'oh! Edited

 

[Glevum Owl]

Interesting question. Certainly made me think.

A quick look on the phone, the camera and in LR using a metadata search yielded the following monthly, rough mean averages:

iPhone - 55 keepers = 29%.
Oly Mk5iii - 66 keepers = 96%.

I think this highlights the different uses to which each camera is put and, consequently, the different shooting styles; the iPhone’s a handy, practical tool for casual use whereas the Oly’s for more planned, creative things.

 

[Bobby T]

How many shots I take depends on what I’m doing. But it’s generally a minimum amount. With most or all being keepers. That said, I’m on my 50s and have been shooting since I was in high school to get to this point. Having gone through the process of shooting things every possible angle and way I could taking countless shots. To figure which way I like the best. And slowly developing a personal “style”.

 

[Toddster]

I have recently created some "rules" for myself that have helped me quite a bit. I tend to shoot heavy and in raw so in the past I would sometimes just get paralysis in post, particularly following a trip. I tried to solve the problem by shooting jpeg but that didn't really help; I still had way too many pictures to wade through and I was not as happy with the results. Now here is how I do it.

Days shoot, typically 200-900 shots depending on the day.
1st cull (preferably on the day of the shoot) all complete misses and out of focus deleted.
2nd cull (preferably on the day of the shoot) I attempt to get it down to 100. The rest go in a rejected sub-folder. This takes some discipline, it often means rejecting decent shots.
Those that remain get processed with my default settings and exposure adjustments only. They are then exported as 100% jpegs.
3rd and final cull is when editing. No rule here on quantity to keep but I try and get it down to what tells the story of the day without many duplicate similar shots.

Storage is cheap so the rejected folder doesn't get deleted. That makes the cull easier for me to do physiologically, I'm not actually deleting anything.

 

[Charzes44]

I'm a bit like Bobby I suppose. The number of shots I take certainly depend on where I am, and what I am doing. I have been taking photos for the best part of 70 years, probably take between 4000 & 5000 shots per year now, and keep about 90%.

 

[p.giannakis]

I buy 10 rolls of film per year and most of the times I shoot about 8 rolls. Out of these I select the best 3 of each roll.

I then store them in film binders. These two folders contain all my negatives from the last 20 years.

Join to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

 

[gryphon1911]

Depends on if it's work, pleasure, the subject.

If it's sports, it could be hundreds to thousands. This last Ascalon Sword Festival I shot over the weekend, the count was 1700 from 2 cameras, plus 5 videos. Out of that, 227 images and 3 videos were shared with client.

if it is portraiture or street, then it could be considerably less and often a lot more directed, so less throw aways. When I go out I can shoot anywhere from 30-150 images and over the years my keepers have gone up from 10-20% to about 75-90%. I am a lot more ruthless on what I want to shoot and what gets the old shutter finger firing.

 

[rayvonn]

keep about 90%

Good going!

 

[John King]

If it makes it out of the camera - about 99%+ - I never delete anything after that.

Always shoot RAW plus LSF JPEG. I use the RAWs for printing and editing, the OoC JPEGs sometimes get posted. I almost never bother with editing JPEGs other than a very occasional straighten or slight crop.

However, I'm a contemplative shooter.

 

[olli]

Thanks to all for responding. I find it interesting that there is such a diverse range of approaches among us all. It reinforces the truth that there is often no single answer or 'best way' to many photographic questions, and that we can all learn from one another.

 

[JensM]

Depends quite a lot, but I take more pictures now than before, after a conscious effort to not shoot somewhat conservatively, a habit from the film days. Not that I am snapping indiscriminately, but I have somewhat lifted the average of shots made from 40-50 (which was typically two rolls of 24) on a dedicated outing to somewhere between 120-150, without me feeling I am forcing it. Looking back on the LR catalogue, my yearly average has lifted from about a 1000 from 2002, when I got my first digital to last years all time high of 6897, with a watershed in 2016 when I got into the M43 system.

As to culling, I dont.

I was being somewhat over-eager with it some years ago with a slow machine, culling lots and lots of pictures without them being fully loaded, and hence regarded as being fuzzy and then binned, but then again, I don't do post on all the stuff either.

I import into LR with a basic neutral preset to get a feel of how things are or can be, and then do work on whatever takes my fancy. I do look over things, every now and then, and find stuff that I work on. Other than the import preset, I normally do the PP by "hand" so to speak, with the exception of copy/paste settings if I have a series of similar shots.

I am also somewhat "bolder" with the post work now, than I have been. Working somewhat more towards the artsy side of things rather than documentary depending on subject matter, if that makes any sense.

 

[doobs]

Unless they're are complete rubbish (shot with the cap on, accidental experts, etc), I keep everything.

Heres why, photo processing software has gotten enormously better since I started digital some 24 years ago.

Shots that were previously thought to be unusable could be made presentable. And in many situations they were captures in time that were important to me to be able to preserve.

I went through my entire collection of nearly 70,000 images reprocessing all of them in Capture One when the pandemic hit. The stuff I was able to save was amazing.

This was helped of course that I've shot raw since my Olympus E10, all 4 megapixels worth!

This jpg's collected with the Kodak point and shoot my father in law gave us did not benefit as much, but they were better.

 

[davidzvi]

A lot less than I used to.

When I got my first DSLR I shot like crazy. Part of the rationale to get it was my kids were still young and the difference between getting a better film SLR or a DSLR was about 30-35 rolls of film. So I shot a lot. A few hundred a day at kids' events. I've cleaned up a LOT of the junk.

Then I took a certification program and shot a lot. 50-200 a day? Also cleaned up a lot of these.

Then started doing event work, I think the most I took was 3200 at a wedding, but I tried to keep it closer to 1200-1800. Unless it's all black or white, I've kept everything. I shot an event where a great-uncle was supposed to have a photoshoot with the family but ended up leaving right after the ceremony (the nurse took him back to the hospital). He was gone the next week. I got one shot of him from a balcony in the crowd, it's cropped and in the album.

Now it depends. A casual walk around 10-30, keep what I like. Vacation? 20-200 depending on the day and sites. Again I cull a bit these days. During the monthly challenges? Most days just 1-10, but more often just 2-3. I tend to think more about each shot before hitting the shutter for challenges.