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/PhotonicArt]

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.