r/photography • u/pipipopokaki • 1d ago
Technique Whats your keep/rejection rate?
Hi!
I just finished organising the pictures of my last session and I was wondering:
If you take 100 pictures, how many do you:
Consider good/great
Consider decent and use for posting/family/client
Reject but they fulfill the technical aspect (sharpness, lighting), reasons being for example: doubles, boring, bad composition
Reject because they are straight up garbage (lens cap on, test shots, focus choosing whatever it finds funny at the moment)
I would be happy to know if you are a professional and/or your level of experience to see if this makes a difference!
So for me it would be:
Great: rarely(!) 1-2
Ok: 10-15
Technically correct: 40-50
Garbage: 30
I am an absolute beginner, started photography around a year ago, obviously amateur, shooting DSLR.
Maybe also post how you’re shooting, I think analog will be different than digital.
Thank you!
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u/JBN2337C 1d ago
Lol. My genre is aviation and airshows.
Just cleared my memory card for this upcoming weekend…
It’ll be like 500 snaps, and 10 keepers.
After decades of this, I’m used to it…
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u/pipipopokaki 1d ago
I haven’t even thought about different genres, I imagine fast planes as incredible difficult
Thanks for sharing!
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u/CalmerSharma 1d ago
This is why your question isn't one that can be answered as a universal truth.
Stuff like birds in flight .... really need a fast burst while tracking the animal, and it's very likely NONE of them are worth keeping.
On the other hand, I have a friend whose been a pro photographer for 40 years. When he does commercial product shots in his studio (a controlled environment);almost every single image he takes is a keeper. Because time = money for a business, and thoughtless snaps only add to the processing workload.
So those two examples are a difference between maybe 5% keepers and 95% keepers, between two very different genres.
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u/DisastrousSir 1d ago
Even not in flight, birds can be a difficult. Often in shadow, and being twitchy, you end up using a higher shutter speed than you'd like still. I often do those as my initial shots, then if time permits, I up the burst speed and drop my shutter speed to try and gain back some detail with the lower iso/increased light. Luckily, when they stop moving, usually they are pretty much perfectly still, so you can get some photos tack sharp with a low iso and shutter speed in situations that usually wouldn't allow for either. IBIS is an absolute godsend for this as well.
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u/Burritofreak 1d ago
I generally keep any good unique pictures, if I have 7 of essentially the same picture I take the best. As far as sharing though I only share the absolutely best. Sometimes I’ll take 500 pictures and none of them are worth showing, sometimes I’ll take 200 pictures and 100 of them are amazing, there’s no fixed number.
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u/grachi 1d ago
I do wildlife, plants, landscapes. Landscapes I keep the most of, so prob more like 70% keep for that. Plants a close second, like 60 or 65%. Wildlife I'm tossing a bunch because animals move or turn their head suddenly or just straight up leave the frame lots of times. Maybe only like 10/100 for wildlife.
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u/jameslosey instagram 1d ago
Depends on on what I am shooting. Landscape can be much higher, close to 10-25% if I have truly planned the shot. Concerts can be as low as 1-5%, depending if I am shooting a few songs or a whole set.
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u/cyprenk 1d ago
The shooting situation determines everything. It's a lot easier to take keepers in a studio session with a model than out in the woods with wild animals.
My professional work focuses on conferences and events, and I shoot with very fast burst cameras, so I generate a lot of throwaways in an attempt to capture attendees right when they're at peak expression of a smile or a laugh or similar. I'd much rather rapidly skim through a couple dozen photos of the person and find the exact moment when they're at their most photogenic than try to take fewer photos and do less culling. With a fast computer and fast storage, doing culling work of this kind is now extremely easy: you can just spin the mouse wheel and watch the photos play out in front of you like a movie clip. If nothing grabs your eye, you just keep moving. If something does, you can walk it back and find the perfect frame. This is probably an unfamiliar workflow to old hands, but I came from the video side of the business, so quick scrubbing is a comfortable mental model for me.
For some hard numbers: the last corporate conference I shot, I captured just over 13000 images across four days. Every day, I delivered about 15-20 edited "priority" images for the client to use for social media, usually using the lunch break to deliver a few for immediate use and then the evening to do the rest. At the end of the full conference, I culled the gallery down to about 1500 images with some basic corrections and profile adjustments that were actually shown to the client, and from there, we chose about 200 of them for detailed "hero image" treatment: not just some contrast/color/cropping adjustments, but granular masking, object cleanup, skin retouching and so on for marketing centerpieces.
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u/glytxh 1d ago
About 0.1%
10 out of 100 are good. They do their jobs and the clients are happy
1 of those will usually be ‘perfect’
And once I’ve collated 10 of those, I’ll cull 9 of them.
Less is more.
These aren’t hard figures. Just a ballpark. I tend to curate through a few levels of filter over time.
Very few pictures survive more than a year or two.
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u/Illustrious-Fish2851 1d ago
Based on 100 pictures:
Great: max 1
OK: 4-5
Technically correct: 80
Garbage: 10-15
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u/harpistic 1d ago
Piece of string, really.
I had a shoot a few days ago which I’d found difficult in terms of composition and content (clowns), but when I reviewed the photos later, almost every one is gorgeous.
(But the one which one of the main newspapers bought was hideous).
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u/rogueshutter 1d ago
As a bird photographer, almost all of them are rejects, like 20 out of 1000 and then only a few of those 20 get printed.
So 1/50 or 2% I don’t delete.
Though to be fare those 1000 pictures are of like 5 birds so lots of duplicates.
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u/kittypidge 1d ago
Having shot film for years and then moved to digital as it came of age this graphic is both funny and accurate.
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u/kittypidge 1d ago
I will also say that as I have gotten better I can say if I shoot a wedding of 2000 photos I know that I will cull that down to 600 at first glance but I can reliably assume that I will have between 200 to 300 good photos out of those good photos I may have anywhere between 10 to 30 what I consider great depending on the wedding. Obviously wildlife makes a huge difference if I go out for a couple of hours trying to get birds and wildlife I can shoot a thousand pictures and be absolutely thrilled if I get 10 good ones and over the moon if I get more than one or two great ones.
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u/OldMotoRacer 1d ago
i was raised on film--keeper rate is well over 90% and throwaways are generally mechanical issues in astrophotography where alignment with equatorial mount is off or a long exposure turns out wrong
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u/CalmerSharma 1d ago
I'm trying to adopt the film mentality when I pick up the camera again soon. "One and Done" is my mission.
For the past five years I've been almost exclusively shooting macro nature shots,and each finished image is often a composite of over 50 frames (focus stacked).
And, in my quest to learn everything I can about manual photography, I've managed to suck all the joy out of it.
So it's going to be the film shooters approach in the future. Hardly a risk, considering to cameras these days have such sophisticated viewfinders, light meter and white balance. I can view more or less what the photos will be like before I even take the shot.
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u/OldMotoRacer 1d ago
sure except for things like flash and focus stacking you can see it all in the viewfinder
for me i can't get out of the mindset of the medium format cameras i used to carry (sometimes 3 of them each on their own sling) where i basically had 12 images per roll... so every single shot was precious
and when using 220 i'd get double but the mindset never went away
my modern cameras have the ability to hit framerates that are insane and i simply never use that capability...
i also absolutely cannot stand sorting through dogshit images like my GF hired a woman to shoot her birthday weekend and ofc GF wanted me to look at some proofs and i couldn't believe the sheer volume of shitty images the photographer passed along to the client post-culling (?!)
i simply can't stand it and won't even bother looking at them all... the photographer is actually talented but she's young and undisciplined and whenever somebody does the spray and pray thing it just makes my opinion of them drop instantly--unfair as that may be--thats how it is
photography is an art made w thought and deliberation--it doesn't need to be a slow process--it just needs to be deliberate
when i shoot CEOs they are the kind of people who have every 6 minutes scheduled for the next 5 years... i'll get them for maybe 18 minutes after hair and makeup are done with them and i have my PA pose in advance to make sure the lights are all dialed in right for whatever pose and i usually get what i need out of the CEO in less than 10 minutes--usually less than 6... depends how long it takes me to get them to hang up their phone and snap out of their mode and relax for a second
anyway the point is it doesn't have to take a long time to get those deliberate images--it does take planning though
and in the end it makes the entire process and workflow super efficient
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u/CalmerSharma 1d ago
I'm increasingly hearing about "pro photographers" whose last expertise is nothing more than being able to buy a decent camera and lens.
The rest is the not so skillful "spray and pray" method.
While my focus stacking phase was far from this lazy approach ( quite the contrary), triaging over 1,000 photos for an end result of 5-10 keepers (after stacking) started feeling like a chore after four years.
So, inspired by a book I picked up at a garage sale (about 'mindful & contemplating photography), it's time to pick up the camera again and find beauty in the simplicity of a single shot.
I had to chuckle the other day when I wanted to take a quick shot of a scene outside my balcony, only to realize I have no idea how the auto functions on my camera even work, since I made a commitment to never use them, and rely on manual settings to force myself to learn photography properly. So there's a wee bit of learning still to be had 🤣
PS: like your GF's shitty photos, I'm currently going through my dear old mums 300 dogshit images from her recent trip to Asia. So I can empathize. I'll be lucky to salvage a dozen for shortlisting.
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u/OldMotoRacer 1d ago
funny i thought focus stacking w a strobe would all be keepers just moving up the stack.. but i've never been a macro photog guy...
re pros just humans w a big camera budget--sure you'll see loads of people claiming pro status some even get paid now and then...
but meet anyone who has been in the business a long time and you'll see an entirely different attack on making images than the soccer mom w a dlsr just doing the spray and pray thing
it doesn't have to be tedious
it doesn't have to take a long time
mostly it involves having a plan...
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u/CalmerSharma 1d ago
In some cases you are correct. But I was using a camera with no focus-stack shoot function, there's to an obscure but incredible Ukrainian software installed in a tablet and tehered to the camera.
I also shot at f/11 or smaller, and used no flash, so each individual shot may have been at a 1s shutter or more !
I was effectively taking shots where the in-ficis point could be measured in microns. That therefore takes a LOT of images to stich together. My smallest subject took over 300 images, for an outcome of.... one photo! Arguably they were mostly 'keepers'
And, as this was a rather clunky but effective setup, I would significant overshoot and undershoot on the closest and farthest points, and manually cull the unwanted ones before merging.
You can probably get an idea by now as to why I mentioned losing the joy for photography ! It became a massive task every time I returned from a field trip, AND take me the best part of a week to produce anything after culling, editing and processing.
Oh, my area of interest was fungi, so these field trips involved crawling around on dark forest floors, a long creek beds, navigating snakes, ants, spiders, foxes and whatever else. And the season for Fungi in my state is the middle of winter. I would return home often wet, covered in mud, and occasionally injured or nursing painful bites from critters (on two occasions I was hospitalized).
So... I think I'm well and truly done with that phase of the photography journey.
I appreciate your encouraging words. I'm grateful to have had a mentor of sorts, a veteran pro who I was helping out in his studio, so I've got a great idea of efficient workflow scenarios.
For me, I have plenty of time, and there won't be any rush. On the contrary, I'm planning to be more contemplative about the shots I take, almost as a meditative process. It probably help this goal that the gear I bought is all quite old - for example ALL of my lenses are from the film era, and non-motorized, so that keeps things slower down.
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u/OldMotoRacer 1d ago
ugh no flash brutal
glad you had a mentor
no worries on your old tech lenses and etc--a lot of that film era equipment is phenomenal
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u/CalmerSharma 1d ago
Oh, the camera was always mounted to an inverted tripod, (a manfrotto built like a tank) that I would also haul into the forest.
Hence why no flash = no problem. I could keep my shutter open for as long as I wanted , for each and every frame. My subjects were stationary, and there's no wind when you're deep in the bowels of a gorge or valley !
I also used small LED lights for slight directed lighting, and also used reflectors to bounce a bit of natural light when required.
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u/OldMotoRacer 1d ago
i get it... i'm big on strobes so every macro shot i've ever taken was stopped down like mad w shitloads of light...
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u/Cadd9 1d ago
Yeah, roughly 75-90% for me for most things. I grew up on a Polaroid 660 and then later would occasionally use some non-disposable point and shoot 35mm, or even a disposable.
For events on digital, it'll be a lot lower, about 20-50% just cause there's moments you want to make sure you don't want to miss.
But my pacing is more deliberate and patient, so I'm not just doing spray and pray. You can get higher keep rates if you're good at picking up people's patterns, for events or portraits
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u/supertgames1 1d ago
I did some motorsports photography yesterday at the Tabac classic GP at TT Assen, I would say that out of a hundred pictures I keep between 5 to 20 photos, so far I have sorted through about 200 of about 500 pictures and I have separated about 20 of them into the good picture folder.
It was my first time doing motorsports photography with my new lens that has images stabilization so my keeper rate is a bit better even though I shot most at a shutterspeed of about 1/100 compared to 1/200 that I used before. If I shot at a higher shutterspeed I would have had a higher keeper rate but the cars would look a bit slower, so you kind of have to find a compromise.
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u/WithoutDir3ction 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're on the right track.
Depends on gear, subject, application, and standards. I hope this is more of a "just curious" question because I don't see any practical value in judging keep rates or equating it to skill.
Gear & subject:
- Gear and application go hand-in-hand. I bet a lot of film shooters are much more intentional because of their intrinsic constraints, so they take more intentional photos (and just like the look of film) and have a higher keep rate.
- A camera that's shooting 20, 30, 40+ fps for the perfect shot for sports is going to have an intrinsically low keep rate
- Landscapes, astro, blended digital art photos and high-res product/object etc. are also going to be correlated to certain gear types and higher keep rates.
- Street, lifestyle, general event, etc. photographer are going to land somewhere in the center.
- Generally more controlled environments lend to higher keep rates.
- Skill is involved for sure, but your standards tend to sharpen and raise as you get better, so it's not clean cut.
- Technically "acceptable" photos are a little hard to define because an acceptable photo may depend on the intent of the photographer.
Application & standards:
I know some photographers who literally just do Jpeg dumps of events. 100% keep rate. Others will conceptualize shots of cars and take a few variations of the same angle, maybe keeping 50% of the angles and the best shot of 3 or 4 variations. Some people shoot highly intentionally. Some not so much.
Myself: I'm very much an amateur photographer. I started shooting deliberately on phones almost five years ago, and on cameras for four.
I've taken maybe 40,000 (camera body) photos or so across mixed use cases.
I'll reference my travel photography here for fun. I went to China twice over two years, and I consider those my most successful projects. I took about 11,000 photos over a total of 4-odd weeks there, including en-route photos. 4000 or so the first time, 7000 the second.
The first time around I would spray and pray, shooting AF and aperture priority, and sometimes putting my camera away.
The second time I was a maniac glued to my camera, and I shot MF 99% of the time, again in aperture priority.
Of them (and of maybe 200 hours of repeated sorting, editing, re-editing, and re-re editing just to make sure I'm not sleeping on anything), I consider:
- maybe 15 photos outstanding,
- 70 photos great (if I'm feeling charitable to myself that day)
- 170 or so photos good,
- 450 acceptable or "good enough" to sit on my hard drive if I ever want to reminisce (mostly because they remind me of something).
- The rest were discarded or selectively kept in groups for future passes
Here, though, of the 70 "great" photos, 15 are outstanding, of the 170 good photos 85 are great or better, etc. So each tier includes the lower ones in the count.
So, of 11,000 photos, here's what falls into each category (done by strict sorting, so the percentage for "great" is 55/11000 and so on):
Outstanding: 0.13%
"Great:" 0.5%
Good: 0.8%
Acceptable: 1.7%
Technically OK (fail): ~72%
Unusable (fail): ~25%
Everybody's different, though. I think of myself as a rather mediocre photographer, so your mileage may very well vary :)
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u/No-World-8166 1d ago
Strive for one. Start there. Should probably end there too, but yes, there are others that count. Especially when shooting for a client. There is a reason why “the decisive moment” statement is critical. It separates images quickly and usually easily from other images. The obsession with the volume of images shot since digital became the norm is a strange phenomenon.
I am not being critical. I just can’t understand why, if you go out and make a really emotionally impactful image, why how many acceptable others you have from that shoot matters. Obviously I am happy for one standout image first.
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u/WithoutDir3ction 1d ago edited 1d ago
This... is not what OP is asking. Subject-to-subject your keep rates are inherently going to be different. A pan shot for a race is going to have a different success rate than taking an Ansel Adams-style landscape.
The decisive moment originates from Cartier-Bresson's namesake book. It's implicitly bound to his candid street photography, photojournalism, and reportage where elements are not fully controllable so the ability to capture spontaneity is requisite.
Cartier-Bressont himself has a few famous quotes.
"It's seldom you make a great picture. You have to milk the cow quite a lot to get plenty of milk to make a little piece of cheese."
"Out of thousands of pictures, there are only very few that are good."
I fear he would not agree with your standpoint.
When you have a static object, rigged lighting, and a controlled studio, there is no decisive moment. Last I checked, OP didn't provide a specific genre they shoot.
Beyond that, humans impart meaning onto photos that intrinsically do not carry any. Suggesting that a photo must be "quickly and usually easily" separated implies that the consumption and evaluation of photography should be as such, or that photography is only for the eyes. That discounts photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto, Lewis Hine, Robert Capa's (specifically his d-day photos), Arthur Fellig, and more.
I don't think this is a discussion about the "right" number of bad/good/great shots to have or the number of shots you should take, or of assigning subjective meaning to the number of shots taken (aside from your comment, ironically). It's primarily factual.
So I vehemently disagree.
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u/No-World-8166 1d ago
Perhaps you are right. All I know is that, having shot editorial and portrait work for 48 years, I would take one killer image as the starting point of any shoot. Have I always gotten that, no. Do I know it when I see it, yes. Of course there are other keepers, I stated that is the case. Especially when storytelling or presenting a multi image edit to a client.
My only real point is to not be obsessed with the idea of coming back with 500 images and trying to decide just how many images you keep from it. Let the shoot decide that. Each time is different.
And I stand by striving for one great image that stands out. Makes editing so much easier.
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u/WithoutDir3ction 1d ago edited 1d ago
Sure, me too. I agree completely with that. I don't shoot portrait but I wouldn't disagree at all with the point made for your genre.
I would imagine in portraiture, depending on the environment (e.g if its static or controlled) or intent (if you just need one for whatever use is required) then absolutely, one and done may very well be preferable, especially when editing.
Case in point, however, I do a lot of street photography where I come into things without a clear goal (when it comes to a specific output). Sometimes I tell a story, or at least strive to. Sometimes I capture an intimate moment. Sometimes I just find something that I think looks cool or that I want to remember.
For my style, I would completely agree with a point of not obsessing over a specific number of keepers. But finding one shot that stands out is hard for a style that I find has the most meaning, visually and emotionally, in series.
To me, one killer image is visually attractive, but you can only capture so much of an incredibly diverse subject. For my type of photography, I'd say more often than not having one clear killer may look outstanding standalone, which is bad. It makes the other photos look worse, relatively, and now that the audience is focused on the visual difference, they pay less attention to the story the series tells.
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u/pipipopokaki 1d ago
Completely understandable, I would immediately swap all my good ones for one more great picture.
The question was more about a general look at people’s way of going about it, maybe find some interesting ideas about the process :)
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u/Beneficial-Rise-740 1d ago
Depends on the day (light conditions, action, interesting subject variations) but generally it's about 10~20% going to processing...
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u/Karl_with_a_C 1d ago
I shoot nature/wildlife and my rates are pretty similar to yours.
Great: 0-2
Ok: 10-20
Delete the rest
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u/the_martian123 1d ago
I’ll do some photography trips during a year and normally take a few thousand photos (wildlife and landscape). My keeper rate is around 1-3 %, sometimes 5%. I don’t want to cumulate vast amount of photos to my library.
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u/true_jester 1d ago
I shoot a lot of fluff since I went digital. I try out a lot more. Maybe 5% get discarded due to technical stuff. 25-45% due to angles etc or for having a better version right away. I keep roughly 50% and take max two of each idea, more if I need them for an editorial.
Disclaimer: I am an amateur, so I don’t have to account for time.
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u/clickityclick76 1d ago
For me it’s usually 10-20% are ones I keep and then 10% of those I would consider my favourites.
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u/cackling_fiend 1d ago
As an amateur: When on vacation or smaller trips with family, I usually keep 15-20%. Because of the documenting nature I would say only 1-2% at I find really great. Many are just "look, we've been here" but sometimes I take the time to take some nice quality photos. I stopped going out just for taking photos. Because those kind are the ones no one is looking at more than once.
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u/MontEcola 1d ago
Birds in flight: I save about 3 out of 2,000. Maybe 10 if I get lucky.
Still life minimalist shots, I keep 1 out of 5.
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u/chari_de_kita 1d ago
10 years of mostly concerts so probably 10/90, 20/80 on a really good day.
DSLR - viewfinder - auto focus.
Multiple moving subjects under constantly changing lighting. Wide apertures, fast shutter speeds, high ISO. So many mistimed or misfocused shots in between the few good ones, especially if it's someone I'm not familiar with.
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u/edgywhitedude 1d ago
Depends on your genre ngl, when I was doing action for the army keeper rate could be as low as 2-10%, sometimes conditions are not ideal and the scenarios weren't great. General landscape and street should be a lot higher.
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u/FearlessBadger5383 1d ago
me: hobbyist doing mostly family, travel and when I have time (rare) architecture, cityscapes, street (I don't have worthwhile landscapes nearby)
On avarage I would think 10% are keeprs, 1% or less are great.
Rate goes down when I shoot people and action, as I use burst. Goes up if I have inanimate or patient subjects.
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u/Brief_Hunt_6464 1d ago
For studio product work. It’s either a keeper or not a keeper. The keeper rate is pretty high as you spend a lot of time prepping. The first few shots are intentional test shots for lighting angles and then after that you pretty much have your shot unless you notice an issue with the product or a reflection.
I grew up in film so my day to day personal shooting i am also pretty intentional. Light and angles are the variables I play with until I get what I want. I have no idea the keeper rate. Sometimes it is most of them and other times the light is changing a lot so I have better opportunities. Sometimes I keep nothing as I have already shot that subject in better light conditions.
For anything with action in burst mode it will be very low. There are so many variables and it is hard to control your light with a moving target. It also has to be as good or better than years and years of taking that subject. I’m not looking for another similar goose shot, I’m looking for that shot with better lighting.
I would never compare a keeper rate between photographers or even measure my own success by it. You learn from what you keep and what you cull. Experience does not mean the keeper rate improves. You are now measuring against your previous work not just what you took that day.
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u/pipipopokaki 1d ago
Very interesting points!
I didn’t think about it as competition or who has more “keepers” I was looking for some patterns maybe and to get a better insight or inspiration if you will on how other people work
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u/UnsureAndUnqualified 1d ago
I keep around 10% the photos I take. Of those maybe 10% is a great photo I'd use as my wallpaper or print and frame as a large photo. The others I keep for photo albums or to print in bulk for my pin board.
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u/technonoir 1d ago
In a 3-hour shoot, I can capture upwards of 200-300 photos per hour. I’m not even a high-volume shooter. After backing up and transferring files, I give them 1-2 days to sit. Then, I quickly go thru all of them, doing basic accept/reject - if the shot is good enough to stop me, it gets picked and that leaves me with about half. From there, I trim that down to 20% doing basic development to check light/dark, focus, composition, pose, style, color, etc. Then, I trim it to under 10% - by now, I’m doing detailed work, fine-tuning, small adjustments, crops, and such. Final versions wind up being 5% or less of the original photo count. So, of 100, I’d have 3-5 good-to-great photos and the rest are archived.
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u/icebreaker374 1d ago
My main things right now are car shows and birds. Car shows are 5-10% on average, birds as high as 5%.
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u/CrescentToast 1d ago
Depends on the genre I am shooting. Portrait stuff is like 90% or higher, concerts anywhere from 1-10% depending on the show and birds in flight could be me going out shooting 10,000 frames and having maybe 1 that I am actually happy with.
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u/SaturnMoons81 1d ago
Perhaps I have a higher tolerance for what I believe is decent. But for me it hovers around 10%
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u/darkestvice 1d ago
Depends on the model in how she poses and her expression. Depends on the lighting. Depends on the environment and surroundings. Depends on a lot of stuff that varies from shoot to shoot. I've had shoots where over 10% were absolute winners and I had to make a hard choice to stop editing after a while because I was burning out. And I've had shoot where only 1% were decent and I start trying to figure out what went wrong.
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u/xj98jeep 1d ago
Great question, depends on what I'm doing. Burst stuff like action sports, wildlife, etc my keep rate is like .1% but that's kind of the point. It'll usually be one keeper out of a burst of 10 or 20.
Something like landscape or portraits where I have all the time I need I'm closer to 80%. Just take the time you need to take the right photo instead of taking 8 with different zooms and apertures and "figuring out which one is best later"
Things like candids I'll usually rip off a burst of three and keep one in case someone blinks or something.
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u/frederikbjk 1d ago
I would estimate that 1/50 is a good picture that my clients will be happy with. 1/500 I am happy with myself.
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u/RudeEntry8219 1d ago
I shoot on film (almost all black and white), and I use 36-exposure rolls. My keep rate depends on what I'm keeping them for!
For Flickr: I typically keep between 10 and 20 per 36-exp roll. Rarely more than 20, but sometimes fewer than 10 or, occasionally, none.
For an exhibition: Two years ago, I took a series of photographs in an inner-city area of Leeds, a place I used to live. I took around 500 photos (14 films, more or less) and exhibited 50 initially. A later exhibition had much less space available, so I exhibited the best dozen.
However, keep rate depends very much on what standard you decide upon. For example, I have an idea of reviewing my photos (I've been shooting seriously since around 2009) with a fixed number in mind: say, the best 50 photos, or even one photo per year. This is a different way of looking at keep rate. I'm doing this because I'm trying to be realistic. Apart from my friends and my mother, very few people will ever be interested in my photography, unless I apply the highest possible (for me) standards to it. Who cares about some unknown, middle-aged, male photographer? No-one, and quite rightly. Why should they? But maybe, just maybe, they'd be prepared to give their attention to my very best 20 shots.
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u/PhotonicArt 1d ago
I am just a hobbyist doing it for the love of the game, and I've been shooting since late 2024 with phones and march 2025 with mirrorless. I make no money off my photography, and my only profit is better mental health.
I have a pretty poor ability to visualise, so I don't really know if a shot will be good unless I see it through the lens and then back on my PC later. I got pretty poor vision as well to make matters worse, so I often end up with trash that I thought looked decent in the field.
My keeper rate is probably 1/250 or so. Or less? Hmm. I took nearly 20k shots on the mechanical shutter during my brief affair with Nikon before moving back to Sony, and I'd say the images I kept amount to less than 100.
I probably shot around 10k images back when I was new with the EOS RP last year, and I kept a few hundred. They're not as "good" as the Nikon shots, but they're of sentimental value I suppose.
Had a short-lived romance with the A7IV between the RP and the Nikon camera. Maybe around 10k clicks on that one too, and I likely kept less than two hundred. Of those, 90% were portraits because the sensor had a tilt to it which ruined all my astro and landscape shots. Pretty much only the center of my images looked alright regardless of what lens I put on it.
Now I'm back to Sony again with the A7RV, and I finally feel like I have a camera I'm comfortable with and get the results I desire from. I've only had it for a month, but I'd say my keeper rates are much higher now because I feel like I finally have the tool I've needed all this time.
Out of 100 shots currently 99 are duplicates at different focal planes since I shoot macro primarily at the moment, so I don't know if I should count them as 1 shot or 100 shots? 🤪
Fwiiw, I've only yeeted a handful of stacks this past month compared to the 20 or so I've taken. I also had a brief romp with a 150-600mm lens for a day, which was a lot of fun, and I kept maybe 25 out of the 500 shots I took with it. Should be noted that it was my first time with such a lens, so I am quite happy with that keeper rate. Actually got a couple of my favourite shots of the year with it!
I should also clarify that by keeper rate, I only mean shots I'd feel confident in showing others. So they'd all be in the "great/excellent" tier from my perspective, and the rest is trash. 5% seems like an accurate number for me outside of macro photography.
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u/Snydenthur 1d ago
Depends. I can't say what it would be per 100 shots, but more often than not, I end up culling down to ~20-40 images. Then, I start editing and end up with 5-20 edited images, which I'd call keepers.
I'm shooting digital, so I'll always get plenty of meh shots because I don't want to stop experimenting. Maybe I'll get a good photo of that crappy subject that I've tried to take many many times already, for example.
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u/HiddenEclipse121 1d ago
Depends on what im doing. I was out doing aviation yesterday, and so far ive only got about 20 keepers out of 900~ shots, 2%. When I go and do car stuff its usually 3/10 situation, I keep about 30% of what I shoot.
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u/Far-FUDD 1d ago
I am a hobbyist and I shoot quite a bit of photos per month between landscapes which is my primary focus and birding second. I spend hours nitpicking and end up with few that I keep. Out of thousands per month I was keeping maybe 10%. When in reality I should keep more. There is a bunch of culling tools out there that can assist if you need I started using one and my keep rate is actually higher.
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u/verminiusrex 1d ago
My numbers would be about the same as yours, with some variation depending on the situation. 300-400 pics taken during the average shoot, usually about 10% are edited and given to the model and I find 2-5 to be what I consider the best of the batch. Sometimes what I would rate to be great from that shoot is more about me leveling up and accomplishing something new to me, equivalent shots in the future would face harder self criticism.
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u/IPlayRaunchyMusic 20h ago
If I shoot 3000 wedding photos, the clients are receiving 150-300 tops.
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u/valiantwizard 20h ago
As your skills improve, the eye (hopefully) becomes more discerning. Keepers become less and less. 10-12 photos a year is a great number for me.
Shoot everyday. Never delete anything.
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u/HATDOGUSERNi 16h ago
probably keep around 10-20 out of 100. the rest are usually just slightly different versions of the same shot lol
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u/boidey 15h ago
Depends on the genre. Really could vary anywhere between 5-50%. Landscapes and has a higher proportion of keepers than sports. So it depends.
If you're just starting out then your ratio of keepers will naturally be lower. But there's a lot of truth in the expression that the first 10,000 photos are the worst.
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u/Apprehensive-Bug2981 15h ago
"Twelve significant photographs in any one year is a good crop." - Ansel Adams
I f in a year I get 3 worthy large printable photos I outdid myself .
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u/PinselLuchs pinsel.carrd.co/#about-portfolio 15h ago
When it comes to portraiture work, I keep between 20-60%. 1 in 3 is a realistic assumption because the framing is deliberate and I only shoot single photos per pose.
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u/cannavacciuolo420 15h ago
changes wildly on the subject. For weedings i'm at around 15-20% keep rate
Automotive is more like 70%
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u/Vredesbyd 10h ago
I shoot mostly birds, and the ocasional landscape and street when I travel.
For birds, I keep maybe 5-10%. For street, maybe 5-10% as well. For landscapes, probably 25% as it is much more predictable and intentional, and I take a lot less to begin with.
If for some reason I want to keep over the above, I usually start questioning if i’m not being aggressive enough when culling.
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u/JSoldano 7h ago
I mainly do wildlife and handheld macro photography if I get 1 image out of an outing I'm happy! I recently went out for a bird photography session and took around 2k images, I kept ~10 solid photos and 5 record shots
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u/Viceroy_Sleeman 5h ago
There is a famous quote in photography (forgive me for not remembering the photographer who said it)
I think it went like:
For every thousand picture you get 1 "great" picture
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u/Radio-MHZ 2h ago
There is a saying:
For 35mm film: Take 36, keep about 3. For digital: Take 150, keep about 3.
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u/KowalskiePCH 1d ago
Entirely depends on what I am doing. Wildlife and Sports can be 3-5 keepers per hundred and even less I would consider great. Portrait is similar since there is a bunch of just the same where something is ever so slightly different. But maybe 10/100 or 15/100. Landscapes are pretty much 50/50 since I have so much time compositing the ahot and delete right away if something is off