For me, I also shoot high school sports and normally Ill shoot around 1000-1100 photos (sometimes its 700 sometimes 1500, just depends on how in to the game I am). But Ill usually get about 80-120 photos on average. Rule of thumb I've always heard is about 10% of the original amount is normal. But every day is different and the numbers vary depending on if things were going great or crappy.
Now I feel a little better about ruthlessly culling my images. 🐯 I'm a hobbyist shooting a range of local sporting events. Most recent outing at a V8 Superboat event, 1050 images culled to 25. Weather was a pain that day. 🐯
Great video. I’ll say that these numbers can certainly vary wildly. When I photograph golf tournaments on assignment (with few structured requirements, but a desire to have full coverage for a magazine) I photograph 4 days and get around 10,000 images from the event. I usually turn in about 300, which includes stock type head and shoulder photos of most significant golfers, so up to 60 of those. Then I have the action shots, reaction shots, environment suits, and coverage of major players like Tiger and the winners. The magazine will use no more than 10 of those over the year. When I photograph specific portrait/ editorial assignments for the golf magazine, I may shoot fewer than 50 images. The last shoot I did, I shot about 50 images which were lit portraits and candid shots of the subject, we shot for a featured article and the cover. I delivered 10 images and they used 7. This is common on shoots like this, where my cover assignment, portrait shoots are typically few total images lit with strobes and then a handful delivered and most used. When I shot my last high school basketball game for the school, I shot about 750 photos and delivered about 75, which included images of every player that played. My baseball shoots end up with 1-2k images taken per game and 20-30 keepers. My headshot sessions end up with around a 30 taken and 2-3 delivered average when it’s for a single person, when I do companies, it’s more like 5 or fewer taken for every 1 delivered.
Im a paid photographer, mostly events. Last jobs i've done were a charity night time and morning run, i shot about 1000, delivered 250-ish so the runners had at least one cool photo and the organisation a lot to use for atmosphere and promoting the next charity event. I've done two afternoons of 2-3 hours of different choirs singing. Shot about 600 per session and delivered 80-100. About 15 photos per choir with also audience and locations shots. Over shot a little to give the amateur choirs some cool shots for their websites. They werent the customer but i always try to help these people that do cultural stuff for free when possible. So i think i have about a 15% keeper / delivery rate with about a 5-10% bandwith up or down depending on the job. But i still need to get better at this. But being slightly frugal when shooting helps me have a better delivery time i feel.
Hi, David, these post-capture topics are great for me. I got a NAS last year and am still trying to figure out my process there! I am a hobbyist family shooter. my “buckets” used to be “around town”, “at the (museum, conservatory, …)”, and “big vacation.” Because the first two involve places I could return to it was easier to learn how be brutal in culling, but those vacations were hard - I doubt can return. Having photobooks, a holiday card, and a calendar as projects helped me decide best and for what audience. Biggest change came when I started photographing my son’s soccer games; suddenly I had huge quantities of photos and other parents’ potential interest to factor in, while at the same time not being a soccer player. So I’d do a few passes from my perspective and then force my son to do a pass with me. He’s never thrilled, the poor sucker! But without him I’d not get the full import of the “non obvious” shots, so that extra subject matter expertise is a big help. he doesn’t suffer from the “keep everything disease” which afflicts me, a further bonus. I also ask him what other shots to try to get next time and use it as a chance to hear him talk about his sport. Because I am a hobbyist without a deadline I can take my time - “ letting the negatives sit in the drawer” as it were, which helps me cull more. But it also means I bring a lot into capture one to see if I can make something of a photo through cropping and so on. I imagine that as I get more experience I’ll have a better sense in advance. Thanks again and take care!
I have always had the attitude that people will always remember my worst images, they forget the fantastic ones that accompany that one poor image, and will recommend me based on that worst image. Very few people will ever see my less than stellar images. At one time, when I shot concerts on film, I was generally happy with about a 3% or 4% success rate. With digital, and the benefits of modern cameras, I do better, generally because the autofocus means that I have a lot fewer out of focus images.
Hi David, great advice. I think I get about the same shooting ratio. I do a lot of conferences and just trying to get those key moments can mean a burst of shots, many speakers only look up from their notes for a moment and you are trying to get that moment. Lots of culling there. Gary S
I shoot theatre for head shots and production stills. As David says, depending on what you're doing and the client's needs, the number of "publishable" images varies. Only need one head shot and about 10-15 images for marketing while the show is running, (no secret reveals or spoiler alerts until after the show!). The curating aka culling is the most important step regardless of the number of images shot. The two fundamental questions I ask (myself) are: 1) should this be published?; and 2) do I want to invest any of my time in the image? Practically speaking, this means about 10 poses for head shots reduced to one printable shot. For the production stills, in the range of 10% to 20% of total frames shot, which varies depending on play, musical, monologues, size of cast etc.. I've gotten more selective in the shots I take, so the percentage is higher. More is not always better, especially if you have to look at ALL of them. (One trick is to bring in a second set of eyes to help cull, especially when you're still fresh from battle and remember something looking better than it shows on the screen the next day.) Then, the big purge. Delete all the useless, dead, never-see-the-light-of-day raw files that are taking up space on hard drive or backup drive and get ready for the next shoot. One caveat, as software improves, (especially as experienced in the last two years), there may be images that can be processed efficiently and effectively using the new tools/features that before, the image had potential, but couldn't make the cut. I've saved a few from the burn pile to try to get something new out of them. But keep in mind, the show finished two or three years ago, so now it's just for portfolio, learning and fun. And yes, I do go back to the film days, when the steps of push-processing film for indoor sports was the norm, as was developing, making contact sheets and then selecting what to print - and how to print. The fundamentals of black and white photography still apply, the tools are just different now.
Last festival I volunteered to photograph at. Took 1600 photos. They just wanted 30 to pick from. Final gallery they used only 3 images. Which I was quite happy with, as nearly all the other photographers only got 2 images in the final gallery.
Always an interesting discussion. I'm reminded of that F-Stoppers video about the Sports Illustrated photographers shooting football (David, you know the one - you worked with those guys!) where Damian Strohmeyer talks about half-time and nobody thinking they got *any* good photos. For me, when I shoot the Toronto IndyCar weekend, I think about 10% of my photos get handed in - but a lot of that is not cars on track, where the percentage is lower, but events, fans, sponsor activation - things where the 10-frame-per-second burst isn't such a big thing. Some smaller percentage of that 10% gets culled by the team boss, who acts as a photo editor before final handins to the organizers. Brian's 10% handin rate for high school sports seems pretty good to me!
To answer your question the amount of keepers is almost always directed by the client I shoot for weather they ask for the best shots only or all the good shots or everything that turns out....... I recently shot a Marathon for a corporate Cilent and shot 19,000 images over the day and delivered the 400 best of shots to the client (sine they wanted the best of the best and winners only). I am also working on a project to document the last of the Giant White Pandas (original batch before all are returned to China and new ones may go out)for this project they want all the good shots I can get so it means up to 2,000 images a week over many months. Like David I also make a qwuick pass through Photo Mechanic to get rid of the junk./out of focus stuff etc and then make a 2nd pas to get it down to the good ones and go from there. Great video!
As an event photographer with mostly music events with 2 cameras I tends to come home with between 3000-6000 depending on amount of groups and time. after sorting them to folders with group names and then go through them I tends to have about 500-800 left per folder ( normally 3 bands ) and after cleaning about 50-80 per band. of them I do get between 5-10 propper work images only that I wants to have. so its still a way to go to get them shutter presses down for me but I'm glad I gets todo it and your videos teaches a lot of good practises so thank you
I remember watching "The Shot" (VH1, 2007) with Russell James. I think it was the first episode where Russell told the contestants that he shoots 100 frames and PRAYS he has ONE publishable image. That comment BLEW MY MIND to say the least. I just couldn't believe it. :-) For me, I am a Model/Portrait photographer primarily and I do A LOT of "secondary" as well. Wildlife/Zoo is my second most photographed cause I tend to try and create Portrait Imagery of the various critters. Talk about challenging. Those models just don't want to listen about 99.9999% of the time. They are going to do their own thing and it is my challenge to try and create portraiture. If I am in the studio, I often tell folks if I am unable to get "The Shot" (no I am not referring to the television series) within the first 8 to 10 frames, I might as well just hang up the camera and never touch it again. In other words ... PLAN, PLAN, PLAN and then PLAN some more. KNOW what it is you are wanting to achieve BEFORE you even set foot in the studio. After that ... once you have "The Shot" then the pressure is off and time to have some SERIOUS FUN. Which helps, in my experience, because everyone is relaxed and more times than not, you get the better images during the FUN time. :-) How many images? Depends on the client. My average is around five images per session. I will post the "RAW" images and allow the client to pick their three to five favorites and those are the ones I will then process. I don't want to waste too much time processing a bunch of images to have those end up in the Recycle Bin simply because the client didn't want them. Of course, there might be three to five images I prefer that I will process and use for my own port, but that's rare for me. Simply because I prefer to use the client's choices most of the time. :-)
Hi David, great food for thought. I am retired and shoot for free to support not for profit groups in my area. Annually my biggest volunteer event is the five-day long Miss Indiana week which last year saw me take more than 37,000 photos which resulted in roughly 1,100 keepers. The biggest reason for the 3% keeper rate is shooting bursts of active talent performances like dance , and the announcements of winners. . . always striving for the peak of action/emotion. Cheers!
Wow that seems a bit steep for my own style of shooting but if it works for you 🤷♂️. How long do you take to cull those 37k photos? I shot 4 days of film festival with panel discussions, awards, art installations and scientific tests, last year and shot about 1000 every day and delivered between 70-150. But i agree if you have a lot of different main subjects to shoot that you need to deliver several photos of better to overshoot a little.
You've covered this topic perfectly. It's an interesting one to explore across different genres. My goal for a typical event / gathering is to deliver about 40-50 images per hour of coverage. Portraits are different. Sports & wildlife, different. I think the only "wrong" answer is maybe feeling compelled to over-deliver, putting quantity over quality.
I've been a portrait photographer for 20 years still shooting dslr. My general rule is to wind up with 7 to 10% keepers from nearly every shoot I do. That's not really my goal but it ends up turning out that way almost every time and it works out well for me.
Great post! I get shoot lots of kids doing lots of activities, and over the course of a week, and we need to get a picture of each kid (70+ kids) at LEAST 3 times for the end-of-week slide show. Each day, I'll usually shoot 2,000 to 3,000 pictures, and end up with 200-300 final images so there is plenty for them to choose from. For the kids, they don't care how good the picture is, they just want to see themselves in the slide show at the end of the week. If I were editing strictly for aesthetic images, that number would be a lot less.
OR, you can practice on your timing and shoot a whole lot less and get more. I'm an old fart who cut his teeth on manual focus cameras where you had to wind the film and cock the shutter before taking a shot and we still managed to get those action shots where the football is touching his fingertips. Yes, it is great to be able to shoot so many shots in rapid succession but I think too many use it as a crutch.
Exactly! When he said he shoots so many thousands at an event I cringed. Any of us who don't spray and pray miss some moments but I believe our work quality is up there with those who basically shoot movies and then choose a few frames from that movie. The only time I've ever had my cameras in high speed continuous mode was to just check them out. I prefer looking through the viewfinder and firing shot after shot. But, even being 'old', I have quick reflexes.
I'm also an old fart, from the days with film, 3 frames per second manual focus lenses and darkroom. I still do that in some cases. But there is no way that those tools could deliver the same quality, that the new tools can. Better resolution, more images to choose from, cheaper images, better lenses, the ability to change ISO etc. I'm so happy with the eye controlled AF and subject tracking in Canon R3 when I'm doing yacht photography - that's a game changer when everything is jumping around in the waves, and I'm driving my boat while taking pictures. Image stabilisation was a game changer for stabilising the viewfinder and composition. It is really difficult and I'll take any help from the technology I can to improve my images - otherwise my competitors will and leave me behind. But like David Bergman said, I normally don't use the R3 at max speed. But if I have a sequence of say 5 images, almost always one of them will be better - the splash from the waves look better, the expression in the sailors face is more intense etc. That is impossible to tell while capturing, and while all of the 5 images may be ok, one is the best and that raises the average image quality, and thus the value of images.
I shot the Reno Air Races last September, taking 20K shots. Of those, I displayed less than 40. it is surprisingly difficult to catch a 250 MPH plane really sharp while at the same time making sure there is blur in the prop.
Hope people realize the info you go thru in this video is hugely beneficial, your process description and tools used ie photo mechanic, & the art of culling… I shoot primary sports (pay jobs / professionally) & of course your spot on with your references, process & on qty a media outlet wants, along with your details on how to get there. It took me years to get from say 2-3,000 images at an event down to 4 or 5 for media outlet while pitch side or post game, or if for a client team game shoot, best of the best in the 60-80 range, eg Basically you just told everyone what it took 15yrs to learn myself, in my opinion good editing work flow is the difference btw making money and not…. On hobby side to me it would equal the difference btw having fun with photography and making it a chore. Lastly I laughed when you said “get off my lawn” as a veteran on the side lines I try to help the younger photogs, because the few times veterans took the time to help me long ago were very enabling…. Great stuff, and I hope someday to be able to join one of your concert series photographing opportunities and meet you in person. Keep up the great content Cheers from CA
Shooted a local gymnastics competition with 70 participants for a whole day (7 hours). Return with approx. 3000 images and delivered approx. 700 to the client. Including groupshots, prices, action and candid shots. I think there is a difference approach for selecting for the most coverage or for excellence. If I selected for excellence, I may only have selected 70 pictures.
For me, it's difficult. I have "snapshots" for remembrance, and shots I get artsy on. The snapshots are never going to make it on my wall, but they might make it onto a screensaver. The artsy ones where I drag waterfalls, or manage to nail a scene, becomes a candidate for enlarging and hanging. I'm pretty harsh in my culling. A lot of them are deleted in camera, and probably at least half that make it to the computer end up deleted. Just a hobby, and we currently are out of wall space, so it really has to be outstanding to replace something already hanging. I've had over 40 years to collect hangables, and at this point I've mounted the best of my best (however good that may be!). So displacing one is really tough.
Good insights. Thanks for sharing. I was photographing Ice Hockey and lacrosse for a while and I usually made around 2000 images, out of those I would select around 15-20 images. For portraits I'm old school, Back in the day I worked with film and would usually take 4 rolls of 24 exp film so that's 96 images, in the digital age I try to stick to around 100-110 images out of those I get around 3 images for myself, my clients usually pick 15-20 that they like.
Trying to move from hobbies to paid work, as a sports photographer. I've been shooting for Highschool and YouthSports. I'm on average 10% keep rate. I have a set number I'm to deliver to my customers. As my side work for portrait photographer its much higher. I take only 4-5 images per setup(the extras being more of safety net, and tend to present 1 so that be a keeper rate closer to 20-25%
I shoot sports for a high school, college and a paper. When I shoot college the keeper rate is often 15 to 20% because I want to get something of each athlete. That way the school has action shots archived of everyone. When I shoot football for a high school that keeper rate falls to 5 to 10% as I’m less about who and more about what, I want action shots telling the story of the game. When I shoot for the paper I’m more selective as to what I shoot and I typically deliver 10 images for print and online use. So a HS football game may have 1000 good shots, 50 of which are for the school and 10 for the paper.
I will be watching your other video with photomechanic, but I'll get home with 5-10k images from motorsports events... I always try and capture some of every car on the track... but I realize, I'm keeping too many and need to be more critical of what I post on my galleries...
I shoot as a hobby for the most part. Wildlife and nature are my focus for the monument. On a typical day of shooting I may shoot hundreds of frames. In the past I had a hard time getting rid of the" bad" photos. I can tweak this or I can fix this was the excuse I would use to justify keeping them. Now that I've more and have the time, I'm burning through them when I sit down to cull my images. I do have a question, what is your feeling about online sites such as Red Bubble? Thanks for the great video.
I agree with your percentages of 'keepers'. But what do you do with the other 3500 files that you didn't select out? Archive them, trash them? Erasing files is the hardest part of the process and knowing that you will never need that image again is a hard decision to make. How do you handle this?
Delete them. If you’re not going to process them or show them to anyone there’s absolutely no point in keeping them. Especially if you’re shooting burst all the time. Surely keeping anything other than the best from a burst is pointless ultimately wasting both time & space.
So do you keep all the photos you tossed aside or do you dump all the photos? Because thats just a ton of storage if you're keeping thousands of inages per event.
Dang, do you all just hold the shutter down all the time? I guess coming from film I shoot very little, in part because I don't want to waste hours sifting through them all. I'd rather be more deliberate and try to get a keeper with every shot (no bursts), though I get maybe 1% keepers, and ya'll would probably say none of those are any good either lol.
So does that mean you completely delete all the rest? I only do photos of buildings. So my keeper rate is much higher, as I never use bursts and have some time to get the individual photo right. In difficult conditions where I have trouble getting a sharp photo handheld, I usually take several photos from he exact same perspective. I shoot RAW+JPEG. To find the sharpest one, I just look at the file sizes. The JPEG algorithm works in a way that every little blur shrinks the file size. So the photo with the largest JPEG file is the sharpest photo. Of course that does not work, if a person walks into the frame, as that will also increase the file size. The fact that people can take thousands of photos to get a really good one by chance is something I hate about modern photography. Of course you still need some talent, but it would feel wrong if somebody one a photography award by shooting tens of thousands of photos and catching a spectacular animal shot by chance. And if a model only looks good on one of a hundred photos, she should probably not be a model. The goal of a photographer should be producing less trash photos. I can understand though that photographers on a sports event, concert or wedding have to work like that to satisfy the client. I did a 40 day trip around the world an came back with only about 12,000 images. I probably had a few thousand more that I deleted while looking through them in the camera while riding the metro. Those 12,000 images are still quite manageable in Lightroom. I mark the ones I will finally use with colours and after I have used them, I mark them with a different colour. Some photographers can't let go bad photos. They think they might still want to use them one day. So they fill dozens or hundreds of terabytes of storage with photos they will never need again and sometimes even put them on expensive cloud storage space. As my camera only has 18 megapixels, my world trip just created 313 GB of files. That is very easy and cheap to store at multiple locations.
For me, I also shoot high school sports and normally Ill shoot around 1000-1100 photos (sometimes its 700 sometimes 1500, just depends on how in to the game I am). But Ill usually get about 80-120 photos on average. Rule of thumb I've always heard is about 10% of the original amount is normal. But every day is different and the numbers vary depending on if things were going great or crappy.
Now I feel a little better about ruthlessly culling my images. 🐯 I'm a hobbyist shooting a range of local sporting events. Most recent outing at a V8 Superboat event, 1050 images culled to 25. Weather was a pain that day. 🐯
Great video. I’ll say that these numbers can certainly vary wildly. When I photograph golf tournaments on assignment (with few structured requirements, but a desire to have full coverage for a magazine) I photograph 4 days and get around 10,000 images from the event. I usually turn in about 300, which includes stock type head and shoulder photos of most significant golfers, so up to 60 of those. Then I have the action shots, reaction shots, environment suits, and coverage of major players like Tiger and the winners. The magazine will use no more than 10 of those over the year. When I photograph specific portrait/ editorial assignments for the golf magazine, I may shoot fewer than 50 images. The last shoot I did, I shot about 50 images which were lit portraits and candid shots of the subject, we shot for a featured article and the cover. I delivered 10 images and they used 7. This is common on shoots like this, where my cover assignment, portrait shoots are typically few total images lit with strobes and then a handful delivered and most used. When I shot my last high school basketball game for the school, I shot about 750 photos and delivered about 75, which included images of every player that played. My baseball shoots end up with 1-2k images taken per game and 20-30 keepers. My headshot sessions end up with around a 30 taken and 2-3 delivered average when it’s for a single person, when I do companies, it’s more like 5 or fewer taken for every 1 delivered.
Im a paid photographer, mostly events. Last jobs i've done were a charity night time and morning run, i shot about 1000, delivered 250-ish so the runners had at least one cool photo and the organisation a lot to use for atmosphere and promoting the next charity event.
I've done two afternoons of 2-3 hours of different choirs singing. Shot about 600 per session and delivered 80-100. About 15 photos per choir with also audience and locations shots. Over shot a little to give the amateur choirs some cool shots for their websites. They werent the customer but i always try to help these people that do cultural stuff for free when possible.
So i think i have about a 15% keeper / delivery rate with about a 5-10% bandwith up or down depending on the job.
But i still need to get better at this. But being slightly frugal when shooting helps me have a better delivery time i feel.
Hi, David, these post-capture topics are great for me. I got a NAS last year and am still trying to figure out my process there!
I am a hobbyist family shooter. my “buckets” used to be “around town”, “at the (museum, conservatory, …)”, and “big vacation.” Because the first two involve places I could return to it was easier to learn how be brutal in culling, but those vacations were hard - I doubt can return. Having photobooks, a holiday card, and a calendar as projects helped me decide best and for what audience.
Biggest change came when I started photographing my son’s soccer games; suddenly I had huge quantities of photos and other parents’ potential interest to factor in, while at the same time not being a soccer player. So I’d do a few passes from my perspective and then force my son to do a pass with me. He’s never thrilled, the poor sucker! But without him I’d not get the full import of the “non obvious” shots, so that extra subject matter expertise is a big help. he doesn’t suffer from the “keep everything disease” which afflicts me, a further bonus. I also ask him what other shots to try to get next time and use it as a chance to hear him talk about his sport.
Because I am a hobbyist without a deadline I can take my time - “ letting the negatives sit in the drawer” as it were, which helps me cull more. But it also means I bring a lot into capture one to see if I can make something of a photo through cropping and so on. I imagine that as I get more experience I’ll have a better sense in advance.
Thanks again and take care!
I have always had the attitude that people will always remember my worst images, they forget the fantastic ones that accompany that one poor image, and will recommend me based on that worst image. Very few people will ever see my less than stellar images. At one time, when I shot concerts on film, I was generally happy with about a 3% or 4% success rate. With digital, and the benefits of modern cameras, I do better, generally because the autofocus means that I have a lot fewer out of focus images.
Hi David, great advice. I think I get about the same shooting ratio. I do a lot of conferences and just trying to get those key moments can mean a burst of shots, many speakers only look up from their notes for a moment and you are trying to get that moment. Lots of culling there. Gary S
I shoot theatre for head shots and production stills. As David says, depending on what you're doing and the client's needs, the number of "publishable" images varies. Only need one head shot and about 10-15 images for marketing while the show is running, (no secret reveals or spoiler alerts until after the show!). The curating aka culling is the most important step regardless of the number of images shot. The two fundamental questions I ask (myself) are: 1) should this be published?; and 2) do I want to invest any of my time in the image? Practically speaking, this means about 10 poses for head shots reduced to one printable shot. For the production stills, in the range of 10% to 20% of total frames shot, which varies depending on play, musical, monologues, size of cast etc.. I've gotten more selective in the shots I take, so the percentage is higher. More is not always better, especially if you have to look at ALL of them. (One trick is to bring in a second set of eyes to help cull, especially when you're still fresh from battle and remember something looking better than it shows on the screen the next day.)
Then, the big purge. Delete all the useless, dead, never-see-the-light-of-day raw files that are taking up space on hard drive or backup drive and get ready for the next shoot.
One caveat, as software improves, (especially as experienced in the last two years), there may be images that can be processed efficiently and effectively using the new tools/features that before, the image had potential, but couldn't make the cut. I've saved a few from the burn pile to try to get something new out of them. But keep in mind, the show finished two or three years ago, so now it's just for portfolio, learning and fun.
And yes, I do go back to the film days, when the steps of push-processing film for indoor sports was the norm, as was developing, making contact sheets and then selecting what to print - and how to print. The fundamentals of black and white photography still apply, the tools are just different now.
Last festival I volunteered to photograph at. Took 1600 photos. They just wanted 30 to pick from. Final gallery they used only 3 images. Which I was quite happy with, as nearly all the other photographers only got 2 images in the final gallery.
Dang. Cool that you got the most shots in. 1600 to 30 seems like a difficult cull at festival with a lot of interesting stuff happening.
Always an interesting discussion. I'm reminded of that F-Stoppers video about the Sports Illustrated photographers shooting football (David, you know the one - you worked with those guys!) where Damian Strohmeyer talks about half-time and nobody thinking they got *any* good photos. For me, when I shoot the Toronto IndyCar weekend, I think about 10% of my photos get handed in - but a lot of that is not cars on track, where the percentage is lower, but events, fans, sponsor activation - things where the 10-frame-per-second burst isn't such a big thing. Some smaller percentage of that 10% gets culled by the team boss, who acts as a photo editor before final handins to the organizers. Brian's 10% handin rate for high school sports seems pretty good to me!
To answer your question the amount of keepers is almost always directed by the client I shoot for weather they ask for the best shots only or all the good shots or everything that turns out....... I recently shot a Marathon for a corporate Cilent and shot 19,000 images over the day and delivered the 400 best of shots to the client (sine they wanted the best of the best and winners only). I am also working on a project to document the last of the Giant White Pandas (original batch before all are returned to China and new ones may go out)for this project they want all the good shots I can get so it means up to 2,000 images a week over many months. Like David I also make a qwuick pass through Photo Mechanic to get rid of the junk./out of focus stuff etc and then make a 2nd pas to get it down to the good ones and go from there. Great video!
As an event photographer with mostly music events with 2 cameras I tends to come home with between 3000-6000 depending on amount of groups and time. after sorting them to folders with group names and then go through them I tends to have about 500-800 left per folder ( normally 3 bands ) and after cleaning about 50-80 per band. of them I do get between 5-10 propper work images only that I wants to have. so its still a way to go to get them shutter presses down for me but I'm glad I gets todo it and your videos teaches a lot of good practises so thank you
I remember watching "The Shot" (VH1, 2007) with Russell James. I think it was the first episode where Russell told the contestants that he shoots 100 frames and PRAYS he has ONE publishable image. That comment BLEW MY MIND to say the least. I just couldn't believe it. :-)
For me, I am a Model/Portrait photographer primarily and I do A LOT of "secondary" as well. Wildlife/Zoo is my second most photographed cause I tend to try and create Portrait Imagery of the various critters. Talk about challenging. Those models just don't want to listen about 99.9999% of the time. They are going to do their own thing and it is my challenge to try and create portraiture.
If I am in the studio, I often tell folks if I am unable to get "The Shot" (no I am not referring to the television series) within the first 8 to 10 frames, I might as well just hang up the camera and never touch it again. In other words ... PLAN, PLAN, PLAN and then PLAN some more. KNOW what it is you are wanting to achieve BEFORE you even set foot in the studio. After that ... once you have "The Shot" then the pressure is off and time to have some SERIOUS FUN. Which helps, in my experience, because everyone is relaxed and more times than not, you get the better images during the FUN time. :-)
How many images? Depends on the client. My average is around five images per session. I will post the "RAW" images and allow the client to pick their three to five favorites and those are the ones I will then process. I don't want to waste too much time processing a bunch of images to have those end up in the Recycle Bin simply because the client didn't want them. Of course, there might be three to five images I prefer that I will process and use for my own port, but that's rare for me. Simply because I prefer to use the client's choices most of the time. :-)
Hi David, great food for thought. I am retired and shoot for free to support not for profit groups in my area. Annually my biggest volunteer event is the five-day long Miss Indiana week which last year saw me take more than 37,000 photos which resulted in roughly 1,100 keepers. The biggest reason for the 3% keeper rate is shooting bursts of active talent performances like dance , and the announcements of winners. . . always striving for the peak of action/emotion. Cheers!
Wow that seems a bit steep for my own style of shooting but if it works for you 🤷♂️. How long do you take to cull those 37k photos?
I shot 4 days of film festival with panel discussions, awards, art installations and scientific tests, last year and shot about 1000 every day and delivered between 70-150. But i agree if you have a lot of different main subjects to shoot that you need to deliver several photos of better to overshoot a little.
You've covered this topic perfectly. It's an interesting one to explore across different genres. My goal for a typical event / gathering is to deliver about 40-50 images per hour of coverage. Portraits are different. Sports & wildlife, different. I think the only "wrong" answer is maybe feeling compelled to over-deliver, putting quantity over quality.
I've been a portrait photographer for 20 years still shooting dslr. My general rule is to wind up with 7 to 10% keepers from nearly every shoot I do. That's not really my goal but it ends up turning out that way almost every time and it works out well for me.
Great post!
I get shoot lots of kids doing lots of activities, and over the course of a week, and we need to get a picture of each kid (70+ kids) at LEAST 3 times for the end-of-week slide show. Each day, I'll usually shoot 2,000 to 3,000 pictures, and end up with 200-300 final images so there is plenty for them to choose from. For the kids, they don't care how good the picture is, they just want to see themselves in the slide show at the end of the week. If I were editing strictly for aesthetic images, that number would be a lot less.
OR, you can practice on your timing and shoot a whole lot less and get more. I'm an old fart who cut his teeth on manual focus cameras where you had to wind the film and cock the shutter before taking a shot and we still managed to get those action shots where the football is touching his fingertips. Yes, it is great to be able to shoot so many shots in rapid succession but I think too many use it as a crutch.
Exactly! When he said he shoots so many thousands at an event I cringed. Any of us who don't spray and pray miss some moments but I believe our work quality is up there with those who basically shoot movies and then choose a few frames from that movie.
The only time I've ever had my cameras in high speed continuous mode was to just check them out. I prefer looking through the viewfinder and firing shot after shot. But, even being 'old', I have quick reflexes.
I shot that way in the early days too. But we have these tools now, so I have no problem using them to make my final images even better.
I'm also an old fart, from the days with film, 3 frames per second manual focus lenses and darkroom. I still do that in some cases.
But there is no way that those tools could deliver the same quality, that the new tools can. Better resolution, more images to choose from, cheaper images, better lenses, the ability to change ISO etc. I'm so happy with the eye controlled AF and subject tracking in Canon R3 when I'm doing yacht photography - that's a game changer when everything is jumping around in the waves, and I'm driving my boat while taking pictures. Image stabilisation was a game changer for stabilising the viewfinder and composition. It is really difficult and I'll take any help from the technology I can to improve my images - otherwise my competitors will and leave me behind.
But like David Bergman said, I normally don't use the R3 at max speed. But if I have a sequence of say 5 images, almost always one of them will be better - the splash from the waves look better, the expression in the sailors face is more intense etc. That is impossible to tell while capturing, and while all of the 5 images may be ok, one is the best and that raises the average image quality, and thus the value of images.
I shot the Reno Air Races last September, taking 20K shots. Of those, I displayed less than 40. it is surprisingly difficult to catch a 250 MPH plane really sharp while at the same time making sure there is blur in the prop.
Hope people realize the info you go thru in this video is hugely beneficial, your process description and tools used ie photo mechanic, & the art of culling…
I shoot primary sports (pay jobs / professionally) & of course your spot on with your references, process & on qty a media outlet wants, along with your details on how to get there. It took me years to get from say 2-3,000 images at an event down to 4 or 5 for media outlet while pitch side or post game, or if for a client team game shoot, best of the best in the 60-80 range, eg Basically you just told everyone what it took 15yrs to learn myself, in my opinion good editing work flow is the difference btw making money and not…. On hobby side to me it would equal the difference btw having fun with photography and making it a chore. Lastly I laughed when you said “get off my lawn” as a veteran on the side lines I try to help the younger photogs, because the few times veterans took the time to help me long ago were very enabling…. Great stuff, and I hope someday to be able to join one of your concert series photographing opportunities and meet you in person. Keep up the great content
Cheers from CA
Shooted a local gymnastics competition with 70 participants for a whole day (7 hours). Return with approx. 3000 images and delivered approx. 700 to the client. Including groupshots, prices, action and candid shots. I think there is a difference approach for selecting for the most coverage or for excellence. If I selected for excellence, I may only have selected 70 pictures.
For me, it's difficult. I have "snapshots" for remembrance, and shots I get artsy on. The snapshots are never going to make it on my wall, but they might make it onto a screensaver. The artsy ones where I drag waterfalls, or manage to nail a scene, becomes a candidate for enlarging and hanging. I'm pretty harsh in my culling. A lot of them are deleted in camera, and probably at least half that make it to the computer end up deleted.
Just a hobby, and we currently are out of wall space, so it really has to be outstanding to replace something already hanging. I've had over 40 years to collect hangables, and at this point I've mounted the best of my best (however good that may be!). So displacing one is really tough.
Great post, thanks Dave!
Good insights. Thanks for sharing.
I was photographing Ice Hockey and lacrosse for a while and I usually made around 2000 images, out of those I would select around 15-20 images. For portraits I'm old school, Back in the day I worked with film and would usually take 4 rolls of 24 exp film so that's 96 images, in the digital age I try to stick to around 100-110 images out of those I get around 3 images for myself, my clients usually pick 15-20 that they like.
Trying to move from hobbies to paid work, as a sports photographer. I've been shooting for Highschool and YouthSports. I'm on average 10% keep rate. I have a set number I'm to deliver to my customers. As my side work for portrait photographer its much higher. I take only 4-5 images per setup(the extras being more of safety net, and tend to present 1 so that be a keeper rate closer to 20-25%
I shoot sports for a high school, college and a paper. When I shoot college the keeper rate is often 15 to 20% because I want to get something of each athlete. That way the school has action shots archived of everyone. When I shoot football for a high school that keeper rate falls to 5 to 10% as I’m less about who and more about what, I want action shots telling the story of the game. When I shoot for the paper I’m more selective as to what I shoot and I typically deliver 10 images for print and online use. So a HS football game may have 1000 good shots, 50 of which are for the school and 10 for the paper.
I will be watching your other video with photomechanic, but I'll get home with 5-10k images from motorsports events... I always try and capture some of every car on the track... but I realize, I'm keeping too many and need to be more critical of what I post on my galleries...
Dave, Can you comment on what you do with the pictures that don't make the cut. Do you archive them or are they, in the end, deleted?
I don’t delete anything. I’ve gone back years later and occasionally find a great frame that I didn’t think was anything the first time around.
@@DavidBergmanPhoto Thank you.
I shoot as a hobby for the most part. Wildlife and nature are my focus for the monument. On a typical day of shooting I may shoot hundreds of frames. In the past I had a hard time getting rid of the" bad" photos. I can tweak this or I can fix this was the excuse I would use to justify keeping them.
Now that I've more and have the time, I'm burning through them when I sit down to cull my images.
I do have a question, what is your feeling about online sites such as Red Bubble?
Thanks for the great video.
Sorry, I don’t know anything about red bubble. Looks like a site to sell your work?
I agree with your percentages of 'keepers'. But what do you do with the other 3500 files that you didn't select out? Archive them, trash them? Erasing files is the hardest part of the process and knowing that you will never need that image again is a hard decision to make. How do you handle this?
I keep everything. You never know!
What do you do with the non-keepers? Storing all those unused files, which are now large with newer cameras, can be very expensive.
Delete them. If you’re not going to process them or show them to anyone there’s absolutely no point in keeping them. Especially if you’re shooting burst all the time. Surely keeping anything other than the best from a burst is pointless ultimately wasting both time & space.
Hard drives get cheaper every day and now I have a massive NAS to store everything. We even need to upgrade that soon!
"Pick that one BEST FRAME." David, did my business name stick in your head a bit after our one-on-one? :D
Hi David! Thank you for this video! Do you delete all the other pictures, which you don't edit with capture one?
I still keep everything. You never know when you might want to go back and sometimes I’ll find a gem in the shots I didn’t like at the time.
I'm pleased I took your likes above 500, -- BAK
So do you keep all the photos you tossed aside or do you dump all the photos? Because thats just a ton of storage if you're keeping thousands of inages per event.
Dang, do you all just hold the shutter down all the time? I guess coming from film I shoot very little, in part because I don't want to waste hours sifting through them all. I'd rather be more deliberate and try to get a keeper with every shot (no bursts), though I get maybe 1% keepers, and ya'll would probably say none of those are any good either lol.
So does that mean you completely delete all the rest? I only do photos of buildings. So my keeper rate is much higher, as I never use bursts and have some time to get the individual photo right. In difficult conditions where I have trouble getting a sharp photo handheld, I usually take several photos from he exact same perspective. I shoot RAW+JPEG. To find the sharpest one, I just look at the file sizes. The JPEG algorithm works in a way that every little blur shrinks the file size. So the photo with the largest JPEG file is the sharpest photo. Of course that does not work, if a person walks into the frame, as that will also increase the file size.
The fact that people can take thousands of photos to get a really good one by chance is something I hate about modern photography. Of course you still need some talent, but it would feel wrong if somebody one a photography award by shooting tens of thousands of photos and catching a spectacular animal shot by chance. And if a model only looks good on one of a hundred photos, she should probably not be a model. The goal of a photographer should be producing less trash photos. I can understand though that photographers on a sports event, concert or wedding have to work like that to satisfy the client.
I did a 40 day trip around the world an came back with only about 12,000 images. I probably had a few thousand more that I deleted while looking through them in the camera while riding the metro. Those 12,000 images are still quite manageable in Lightroom. I mark the ones I will finally use with colours and after I have used them, I mark them with a different colour.
Some photographers can't let go bad photos. They think they might still want to use them one day. So they fill dozens or hundreds of terabytes of storage with photos they will never need again and sometimes even put them on expensive cloud storage space. As my camera only has 18 megapixels, my world trip just created 313 GB of files. That is very easy and cheap to store at multiple locations.
Remember, each team can only have one keeper!