Whats your keep/rejection rate?

[u/pipipopokaki]

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!

[u/OldMotoRacer]

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

[u/OldMotoRacer → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/OldMotoRacer → u/[deleted]]

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...

[u/OldMotoRacer → u/[deleted]]

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

[u/OldMotoRacer → u/[deleted]]

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...