I was asked recently on Twitter on how many photos I take and of those how many I end up keeping. It’s not something I usually keep a track of but I did for the three days I was at RIAT.
In those three days I shot a total of 2164 photos (48.61GB of RAW files).
My first pass through the photos is to remove the ones where I had cropped off part of the aircraft (very low with air show shooting due to the distance), photos that weren’t sharp and duplicates (I tend to shoot a few extra each time and choose the best later). This reduced the 2164 down to 494 photos.
Next I will keyword the photos and rate them. 1 star for reference use only, 2 stars for photos with some aspect that isn’t up to scratch, 3 stars for photos good enough to be used on the web, 4 stars for photos that can be used for A2 printing and 5 stars for something exceptional.
If I have a lot of shots of the same aircraft I will remove the lower quality ones. This tends to happen at airshows where you will see the same aircraft perform over a number of days and you will shoot it a lot. To me there doesn’t seem to be any point in having 10 photos of a particular aircraft that all look very similar regardless of how high the quality.
This brought the number down to 255 of which 121 were shot on the show day, the rest of the two practice and arrival days. The breakdown of those was…
5* – 2 photos
4* – 17 photos
3* – 51 photos
2* – 43 photos
1* – 8 photos
I have no idea how this compares to other photographers as it’s not something I keep track or have discussed with other people but for an air show a keeper rate of 1 in 9 doesn’t sound unusual to me.
Just found your blog, interesting post! This message could have been written by myself. People are surprised when I tell them I have only collected just over 2000 photos in 5 years. Do you use Lightroom as well?
Only a couple of differences for me. I use the same rating system, but I tend to be very reserved with giving images 5 stars. In 4 years and 11 months I have now shot 93 5-star images. I do have a lot of 4-star shots though. Basically if the light, sharpness, composition and background are fine it gets 4 stars. Other shots get 3 stars or less. 1-star is reserved for images that should actually be deleted, but too ‘exotic’/’special’ to do so. This is my score in almost 5 years:
5* – 93x
4* – 819x
3* – 659x
2* – 130x
1* – 3x
A total of 1704 rated/developed out of 2288 images that I kept (74%). I keep on deleting old images when I shoot better photos of the same aircraft or (sometimes) aircraft type. I must have shot something like 20/30,000 images, so the keeper-rate is something like 10%. Now that I write this I am quite surprised, didn’t know the rate was that low! Am I a bad photographer now? ;-)
Thanks for the reply Dirk. Good to read someone else’s experience.
I tried the first two versions of Lightroom but preferred to continue on using Bridge and Photoshop CS4 but Lightroom 3 has me tempted. I really liked the dual monitor support and speed it could handle several thousand RAW files but I don’t think it’s worth the cost. Unless it comes down in price I don’t think I’ll be moving over just yet.
I would suspect the ratio of discard to keepers you suggest is typical. I’m still very much at the enthusiastic amateur stage as regards skill (not exactly being flush with opportunities for either fast jets or even airshows in NZ), but did a similar numbers breakdown myself not too long ago and got similar results:
http://offblack.blogspot.com/2010/04/easter-hornets-numbers-ratios.html