A place to politely discuss the tools, technique and culture of photography.
This is not a good place to simply share cool photos/videos or promote your own work and projects, but rather a place to discuss photography as an art and post things that would be of interest to other photographers.
That’s gonna be different for everyone. I do studio work with products, and 9 times out of 10 we have concept illustrations we’re working off of so the client can approve before we even touch the camera. Because of that, I don’t really fire off shots that I’m not using.
Ask me to shoot a football game though and I’ll probably hit 1 out of 1000 shots lol
Because of that, I don’t really fire off shots that I’m not using.
I don't know why, but this is cool as fuck to me. "My name is Vilonious, and I don't miss."
Entirely depends on the type of photography you're doing.
I can shoot the outside of a building or tabletop product photos with a 50% keep rate.
Pinup photos with a first time model? I tell them that 1% awesomeness is success.
If you can't remember your intent when it's time to edit, write it down. That will help you be more intentional when you shoot. It was what photography students had to do pre-digital.
Also, start analyzing what went wrong with the 99% you don't use so you can stop doing those things.
Depends on the day and the subject tbh
I do sports photography and I think maybe I get somewhere between 1 in 5 to maybe 1 in 10 if it's a bad day. But a lot of time the action is happening pretty quickly and you just take a shot hoping something exciting happens and usually it doesn't. But I'll have like 1000 shots or more after a session so it all adds up.
Depends a lot on the genre.
For a landscape, it's pretty close to one and done. There's no real excuse to click the shutter before you have exactly what you want in the frame. Ditto for architecture, object study, etc.
Portraiture? Maybe one in four or so. You want to experiment and take a few and pick the best later.
Sports and action is mostly spray and pray. You shoot a hundred and hope one is the key moment.
I do action and portraiture. It’s hard to switch gears, and sometimes I end up with like 80 nearly identical shots because I just keep hitting that shutter button by reflex.
Depends. I shoot a ton of street and landscape. Maybe 1-2% street. But my landscapes are carefully planned and executed so I get like 20%. The thing is that, a lot of the time at least with me, I get keepers that may not be exactly what I intended when I shot it but, with a little cropage and postprocess magic turns into a keeper. When I cull I have definite keepers, maybes and nopes. I may get an extra few percent from the maybes later on…
When I first started out on film we had to be more deliberate with our shots so that made me stop and think and learn to compose and frame on the first try. I did that for ten years before going digital. Also a lot of photography is VERY subjective. Some people will hate everything you do. Others will love it all. Still others will love shots you think are sub par or absolute shit.
Just back from three weeks in New Zealand where I took 1,600 photos. Been through about 75% of them and I have about 30 keepers. That’s about one keeper for every 40 photos.
To be fair, I took a lot of photos to stitch as panoramas. Plus, I tended to take two or more photos of the same thing and hope that one of them was sharp. Still, there were some where I don’t know what I was thinking.
If I had been by myself, I probably would have used a tripod and taken more time and had fewer duds. My wife was very patient but it was her holiday too.
Yeah I feel this, most of my shooting outings are outings with my better half and she’s the same with being patient with me but I can only spend so much time in one place because she deserves attention too haha
Next time you come here you can borrow my tripod :)
Thanks for the offer. I took a tripod but only used it when my wife was sleeping in. Helpfully, she slept in at Kaikoura, Wanaka and Queenstown.
That's a shame you missed the awe inspiring beauty of Hamilton's high street at 3am on a Saturday.
A drunk hamiltonian searching for some kebab or overwarmed pie is something you won't find in a zoo and an beautiful testament to the diversity of our fair land.
Visited Hamilton. One photo is a semi-keeper. The Renaissance Garden. The second - a panoramic photo of the food court didn’t make the cut. Sadly, we needed to get to Rotorua by nightfall. Looking forward to seeing the 3am shots though!
I shoot street so everything looks like shit. In a year, I'll have less than 10 photos that I'm truly proud of.
This is a good thing to point out. "Photos I'm willing to at least share" are usually something you can find. "Photos I'm proud of", because I imagined a shot, made all setup and preparation, and it worked out? Way smaller set.
When I first started to get into photography I was friends with a full time professional photographer that owned a studio business and shot magazine covers. He’d been shooting for many years and made incredible images. I asked him how many good photos he’d taken over the last years and he thought for a minute and said, “Six”. I understand that. As you get better you start to be more self critical.
I have a masters in photography now and I think that my “good” photos are only good because they are in successful dialogue with other photos. Really the question I’d ask is, what projects are good. I have two projects that I think are decent.
Handheld macro on live subjects and wildlife handheld with telephoto. Keeper rate ~5-10%, actual willing to show people rate? Less than 1%.
Thankfully I'm not going through film, because I'd be going broke :D
The more I learn about photography, the lower my successful shot rate. Weird math but true.
This is a classic example of where the more knowledge you get and information you consume, the less happy you get.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss!
I do landscape and à bit of street photographe. I get about 5% of good shots with street photography and 0.5% with landscape photography
Went for a trip, and took about 1,000 pictures. I was happy with about 50-75 of them.
Pure hobbyist and so far I sit around 1% of keepers.
I don’t have a lot to add that hasn’t already been said toward your primary question. Something you said later on made me want to chime in. While there is indeed no replacement for experience, it is possible to accelerate that growth through education. If you haven’t already, watch YouTube videos on elements of design and principles of art and specifically how they relate to photography. You may see an increase in “keepers”.
I’m a wedding photographer. My last wedding was relatively small with a simple beach ceremony and a nighttime reception (used flash. Had to be judicious with my shots.) 4,300 shots and I’m probably going to deliver 300-400 edited photos to the client’s gallery.
For myself I find it most helpful to break down why the photos are not keepers/sharers: technical mistake? Just a boring picture? Missed the moment? Is the picture good, but I’ve got a better one? Is the idea good, but I got a better one? Does it not tell an appropriate story?
First, my experience level… I’ve done editorial, commercial, wedding, macro, concept, street, art, and event photography. my success rate is 0% percent over 40 years of photography.
I’m still confident that my next shot will appeal to people and will be “” successful . Sometimes you just have to believe.
I'd put myself at beginner level, shooting on occasion for the last two years. Probably film for the last year especially once I started doing my own home development/scanning
Digital keeper rate is probably 5% if I'm being optimistic.
35mm film is maybe 10-15% but it varies by roll
120 film (both 6x6 and 6x9) I haven't shot enough of in order to figure out yet. I have a few that I like but I'm trash at DSLR scanning, inverting, and fixing them
This is quite subjective!
I’m a full time portrait and wedding photographer, and my goal is to always get the best shots I can. I have developed my brand and style over the years by practicing my skills and experience. I’ve always had an eye for art and photography/framing an image. Art and creativity runs in my family in many ways including my mom paints and my dad used to do black and white film photography. I used to want to be a cinemaphotogroaher but the film industry is way harder to get into and you have to know people and basically live in Hollywood.
Sooo I gravitated towards photography in my youth, and pushed myself out of my comfort zone to learn more! My growth has led me to know how to line up and image to try to get the most flattering image as possible. Of course my favorites so edit will differ from my clients favorites. I get a good variety of poses, candids, backgrounds, etc. so I feel I do a great job every time I go out and photograph. I get repeat clients and clients who compliment their images they receive with awesome feedback.
As a photojournalist and also corporate professional, this number varies greatly.
Shooting photojournalism you can shoot from 20-100 shots in an assignment, maybe 300 if you're rapid firing speeches or events (not including sports) and 1-3 go with the article. But now everyone wants a dozen choices and a photo gallery, so you have to up your game and produce more. I turned in three recently and got begged for my rejects and they ended up publishing six in a magazine out like 20 fairly bad choices.
I went to Iceland and shot 3,000 photos in a week, got home and probably liked 300, but 12 went on the wall.
But then I went to Arches National Park yesterday, shot 158 pictures (50 were for a panoramic HDR to be fair) and I've just now produced 4 total pictures for showing off and I'm pretty sure I actually like 2 of them.
I shot an all-day event last month and had two cameras, so I shot like 6,000 because I was chasing a lot of kids around the park, getting vendors interacting, etc. and the client wanted 150 finals, including all the musicians, award winners and demonstrations, so I had to massively increase the number of shots I took to get 150 good shots.
And then shooting portraits I can do a dozen for a headshot and produce 3-5 for the client or I can shoot 200 for a session with lots of movement and outfit changes and get 25 I like but only 8 that they like.
It's a crazy numbers game for sure. I don't know if someone can derive a percentage out of my stats but this is kind of how it goes. But at least I can generally go in to an assignment with these intentions in mind and shoot with the goal of getting those outputs for them or myself.
I shot a wedding the other day. 2000ish frames captured. 500ish edited and delivered to the clients. 100 of those I think are pretty good. Maybe 10 are great? Maybe. I consider that to be a good shoot.
Depends on the subject. Football, I'm keeping 10%. Portraits are going to be much higher. Perfectly happy with the 10% because your level of control in what's happening on the field is an educated guess at best.
Bought my first camera about 2 years ago and did mostly landscapes since then. I had to learn a lot of basic photography, which reduced the pictures with actually nice compositions and correct exposure to a bare minimum of below 1%. Even now I push the button a dozen times just to get a feeling for how different a scene looks through the camera compared to how I see it.
Overall, I had hiking vacations with about 1000 pictures and i used 150 of them for stitching panoramas and out of the rest, I kept about 30 for a photo book. But the quality that I would print them big and hang them on my wall? Maybe 5 of them.
I don’t shoot much outside of the studio. I’ve never been that good on my feet like that.
Even with the complete control over studio conditions it can still vary a lot, like maybe the hair isn’t right, or wardrobe is problematic because it doesn’t fit or whatever. Biggest determinant for what I shoot is usually how comfortable someone is (and experienced at) being in front of the camera.
Experience level: idk. I’ve done a lot of commercial work by happenstance, but I’m only really good in very specific situations. So I’d probably two myself at like a neutral number in the middle.
Photo degree / 15 years experience / committed amateur level of involvement
For my landscape stuff, barring some unforseen malfunction or thing moving through the shot, it's as close to 1:1 for shots to keepers as I can manage. Once you know what your settings / lens can give you, there's not really a reason to set up for a shot unless you see the potential.
For my concert stuff, especially since I only use available stage and ambient lighting, I usually average around 20 - 30 sellable quality images out of 500 - 750 shots.
studio photographer here 7 plus year experience shooting professionally ( been shooting as a hobby for way longer tthan that..... since i have moved back to film i would say 98 percent because there is always room for some technical issue with sync using old camera and strobes. but depending on what you shoot there could be very different result, the camera i used was designed for sport and can burn through a full 36 exposure film roll in just about 8 second so i guess back in the day when using it for sport it would be normal to shoot a hundred rolls and only have a 2 or 3 picture published so it really depends on what you do
P.s as you progress through your photography journey your eyes will develop and what you might consider amazing today will become very ordinary in the future the opposite is also true ... when i started i though film photography was inferior now i cannot shoot anything else than film photography
Snapshots.of just whatever, like strolling the streets? 5 or 6 an hour. Shooting weddings? 5 or 6 a minute. Landscapes devoid of glass or concrete? 5 or 6 a day is phenomenal.
The more you learn, the less successful you’ll experience. It’s a great little frustration hobby.
I just spent two weeks in Japan. We were in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nara.
I took 3000 photos. I shared 600 of those. I whittled down about 100 that I'm proud enough to put into a book.
So that's about a 20% "facebook worthy" rate and 3.3% "portfolio worthy" rate.
Now that's also keeping in mind that you can point at basically anything in Japan and capture something worth printing, with enough patience.
I live in South Carolina, so... not so much here.
Same, same. Two weeks in Japan, took around 4000 shots. Maybe 10% worth sharing. Japan is very photogenic!
I mainly do macro work on insects and plants in the wild. 1 in 1000 is my rough estimate. But I also shot like 4000 pictures in a 2-3 hours time frame.
But in the end I usualy end up with at least 2-8 Keepers and one realy good picture.
When I did do product shootings in the studio almost 100% after setup.
Portait work depends on the model. Simple Business Headshots 9 in 10 workable 1 in 10 great.
Events 3 out of 5. Workable. 1 out of 10 great.
I actually calculated this success rate for my internship report in 2017 after I finished my mandatory internship with a national newspaper.
I dont have the numbers on my phone but it was around 10 % overall that were submitted after the assignments, and 10 % of that were printed (1 % of the RAWs make it into the paper)
There was a slight deviation between zooms (politics, breaking news, spray and pray) and primes (reportage, portraits, landscapes) that underlined the differnent shooting styles of the lenses. I suppose this should still holds for my news work these days.
I also started collecting the data for weddings because I felt that an 8h wedding didnt yield double the pictures of a 4h wedding The „success“ (send) rate sits at 13,2 % for 12 weddings in 2022/2023.
I'm a newbie. Just got my first real camera two weeks ago..
I went out and shot 238 photos in the woods the other day.. and I've kept 100 that I'm willing to spend time editing.. I'll probably lose another 20 during that stage..
I've been shooting on my phone for a couple years now, but I don't think I ever really kept a tally of shots taken versus shots saved..
I'm not sure what my experience level is. I get told I'm experienced but there's always more to learn and develop upon.
At the moment I mostly photograph gigs. Sometimes I have a decent strike rate and sometimes I don't. On average I'll process somewhere around 10% to 20% of what I take and from that I'll provide 20 photos per gig.
At the moment I'm taking too many photos. The last gig I took somewhere around 1,100. Trying to keep it at 800 at most.
For this year, off the top of my head there're two photos I'm really happy with. Maybe three, and all are from the same gig. In a year or so I might not feel the same way, but we'll see.
I am happy with about 10% of my photos but narrow that down another 10% as great so 1% overall. For a wedding or family event, if I can give them about 100+ edited pictures that is great, with 10 or so I would edit the raw photos another round that I would consider posting.
My usual estimate is around 10%. I'm just an amateur, usually doing street and landscape shooting. I pretty much always fire off at least 2 or 3 shots just to make sure one is sharp or to try different settings. So a lot of the 90% rejects are just duplicates, not necessarily "bad" (by my standards anyway).