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Not sure if this have been raised before, but I'm quite interested on this specially on the DSLRs which you get to shoot and shoot non-stop.

At the very first days I touched the SLR for film, I had to buy/develop the film which cost me a huge forturne. So I took every shot with care and thought it thoroughly before hitting the shutter. Now with the DSLR it seemed to have spoilt the art of thinking and composing the shots, just shoot, chimp, adjust and shoot again. Making excessive number of shots taken. Though, how many of these will you be keeping or worth printing?

When started, I get overly joyed with the 'low cost' of shooting digital. I kept the shutter rolling all times, but only having 5-10% keepers (maybe mainly from test shots). For now I tend to shoot less and keep more, will say at the 50% ranges.

I'm curious about the others here

This raises a good point. It's easy to just blat away and hope to get a keeper, rather than take time and ensure your camera is set up correctly, exposure, shutterspeed, iso etc, to get that perfect shot.

I used to be a blatter, now I take my time, think my shots through more, right down to where to stand on a track to get the sun in the right spot and have improved my keeper rate.

Trackside (with equipment I used before) I'd say my keeper rate is about 60%. That being said, I could go through my keepers and cull them based on what I want others to see, but I'm a bit of a harsh critic at times.

When I first started I too used to hold the finger down all the time and hope for the best... keeper rate was low..lol

Nowdays, i'm finding that i can get much better results by using manual, and taking my time to get the right exposure. d200 has helped with this a lot.

A drag meet I shot recently i took 450 shots, and culled 23 that were under/overexposed or oof.

When i was using my 2GB CF Card (350~ NEF) i was keeping about 50-60% of the shots.
Ive bought a 4GB CF Card (700~ NEF) and the keeper rate decreased. granted i have only used the 4GB Card once and gave it a fair drilling.

Also my keeper rate seems to increase depending on what lens i am using, and what i am trying to achieve in the shots. I doubt i will ever reach a 90-100% keeper percent, but the more photos i take the better some are than others and i dont need 10 shots of slightly different angels, colors, light ever when 1 good one is enough.

Kinda depends. Every time I go out on a meet/shoot, if I come back with 3-4 that I'd be happy to print, IMO that's a great day's work.

If, however, I am running around taking group photos and portraits at a family gathering or BBQ at friends etc, the keeper rate is much higher.

If I go out trying to get a good sunset/sunrise/waterfall etc shot, one stunner in a hundred is enough for me.

EDIT: Oh, also it depends on what you regard as a "keeper". It might mean "good enough to print" or it might mean "I won't delete it"

My keeper rate is quite high these days. Most of what I do now is on film and that has forced me to be mindful of **every** aspect of the shot before shutter release… there is no chimping with film. I work methodically and deliberately to get the desired outcome. This approach translates well to digital.

Cheers

It is hard to say, for a number of reasons:

1. I am still on a very steep learning curve, particularly when it comes to use of flash, which means I am taking a lot of ordinary shots.
2. When I take 'nature' or landscape, I tend to bracket 5 or so shots at a time which, by it's nature, tends to result in a lower keeper rate.
3. I am becoming increasingly particular about my photos, and therefore, tend to think photos that could have been keepers a while ago are now rubbish.
4. Taking photos of DSLR forum members on meets naturally results in a low percentage of keepers.

That said, I use the f90x relatively frequently where I am more deliberate with my comp/exposure and get a higher percentage of 'keepers' out of a roll of film than a CF full of photos.

P

I try to use the motto "1 shot, 1 kill" but it does not always work out that way

If I know what I'll be shooting for, or what I have in mind from the shot seen, I usually get it. Up high in the 80-90% 'hit rates' when I'm shooting alone.

Going out doing a proper shoot/job, I know I have to get the keepers high enough, but as well as the number, again this falls into the 75% ranges.

Although from whats being said above, when you're out with friends, its hard to stop. Keeping shutter rolling is just as fun as it is This is only a 10-30% keeper rate, but I just want some memory and fun photos, no such arty-farty stuff to bring home.

All on average it falls into the 50% category I would say. Its getting harder as to critique harder to myself, but this makes me shoot less and think more actually

I'll have to get back to some old films in the fridge and see how well really are keepers around, when I get my film SLR fixed.

It depends on the subject matter.

For motorsports with my current setup I find that I will get around a 33% keeper rate. As with others I will cull these down dramatically. I also find this is determined by two things;

i) The afore-mentioned gear (the 70-300 G lens is not the best in the world). Which doesn't leave a lot of room for error, it also is not the sharpest out there when you go above 200mm... But I get by and it's been a great lens to learn on.

ii) How often I am shooting, when I've not done motorsport for a month or so I find it takes me a period of time to get my eye back in to a point where I am happy. I think the fact that I am still starting out has a lot to do with this.

For other work my keeper rate is much higher, around the 60 - 70% marks, but then I find I will compose the shot from a few angles in order to get the one I really want. I suppose this is the luxury of digital, that some may call laziness...

I know that I definitely am glad to be shooting digital, trying to learn all of this by yourself on film would have been expensive...

That's a tough one to answer. I think it all depends on what you call a "keeper"...as losfp suggests.

If a keeper is "10/10 - print it and hang it up" material, I would be surprised if we're all still quoting a high percentage.

If a keeper is just an average photo that is good enough to keep but not print, then it's a completely different story....and I can understand why people are saying they have a keeper rate of anything above 10 - 20%

My keeper rate is as low with digital as it was with film. It's just cheaper now.

Well I'm one of the rare idots tha keeps all my shots, I've probably deleted 0.005% of my photos and that has usually been under duress.


Photos I'd print, but haven't so far 400 odd

Photos I've printed 600 odd out of 36,000

Photos that are absolute rippers maybe 20 photos in 36,000 (so abmismal)

So my sucess rate is very low, if I had a better work flow I'd be able to assess it better but I'd say its way below 5% ?

For regular photos, out of any given 100 I'll probably delete 20%, and edit 10%. Those and the rest I'll keep / burn to DVD.

For holiday photos, I tend to print out about 300 out of about 4000 taken, but of the original 4000 I'll probably have deleted about 500 as just not worth it. The rest I'll burn to DVD to peruse at my leisure sometime later (maybe).

Alpha_7 wrote:Well I'm one of the rare idots tha keeps all my shots, I've probably deleted 0.005% of my photos and that has usually been under duress.

I'd be one of those idiots too For some stupid reason i'll even keep the incorrectly exposed ones.. usually get rid of oof ones though...

Aussie Dave wrote:That's a tough one to answer. I think it all depends on what you call a "keeper"...as losfp suggests.

If a keeper is "10/10 - print it and hang it up" material, I would be surprised if we're all still quoting a high percentage.

If a keeper is just an average photo that is good enough to keep but not print, then it's a completely different story....and I can understand why people are saying they have a keeper rate of anything above 10 - 20%

That is actually a good point...

What determines a keeper? To me it is a photo I am happy to display to others, not necessarily print.

I too am one of those people that keeps all images. It is very rare to actually delete a photo, I like to see where I screwed up But out of the 22,000 photos that have been taken roughly 1000 have been printed, most of these are of a family nature.

As far as printing and framing, I personally have only done one so far, there is another one that will be done shortly.

I like some maybe surprise myself as to what i think might look crappy in the veiw finder and when i get home i find myself not delelting mush at all.

I can take about 3 to 400 shots a day and then come home and delete maybe 5 or 6. Sprintcars at night with flash i just give up.!!

My keeper rate varies,

for action stuff using a long telephoto lense hand held, shooting animals for instance I might get 1 in 50 that are really stand out shots. Shooting Cars on a race track is a little more predictable I might get 1 in 10 I like allot.

Portraits are hard for me still, again probably a 1 in 5 or 10 real keeper rate if the people are ready and smiling. Lower if it's on the spot stuff at a party etc.

If I'm shooting landscapes I am happy with 1 good shot for a days work.

I don't think it's possible to have a 100% keeper rate, I always delete whats no good, and only show the best of what is ok. Seems to improve my shooting, if I look at whats good, well framed, nice lighting etc I am more able to repeat it when I need to.

Isn't it ironic that one of the benefits of digital photography affords the photographer to take a number of photos on each occassion, to peruse and select the best at a later date, then delete the weaker images, all without the need to fork out sums of money to have them all processed. This benefit then seems to fall short when the deleting equation is skipped over (for the most part).

Luckily CD/DVD's are fairly inexpensive. Otherwise, one could count up the cost of keeping all the 100's of Gb of images we are storing (for later reference) and consider that against the cost of processing film.
Admittedly, not every digital image is processed so comparing the same number of photos taken between dSLR & SLR would be biased.....however, if we were still shooting on film, I'm tipping we all wouldn't have anywhere near the quantity of images we are currently storing.

In saying all this, I too keep most photos but I am trying to cull where possible. If they are severely under/over exposed or way OOF, then I will delete it. Alot of the images I have taken are family orientated, so a high number are good enough to view on screen/TV for posterity.

When I do get the chance to go out and take some "non-family orientated" photos, I usually have a keeper rate somewhere between 50 - 80% (depending on if I'm having a good day or not), and maybe 10-20% are worthy or printing or showing others.

What would be interesting to know is:
- how many keepers do you take where virtually no PP is required to finish off the photo ?

BT*ist wrote:For regular photos, out of any given 100 I'll probably delete 20%, and edit 10%. Those and the rest I'll keep / burn to DVD.

I'm pretty much in that category.

To give you some idea, when I was regularly updating my main photo site it had about 10k images on it and I had about 60k images on my hard disk. But I was also deleting more of the duds at that stage, mostly because I took quite a while to get the hang of taking sharp photos while riding my bike or running around. But it also includes probably 2k photos where I was at events that asked me to put up every usable photo I took - one Pedal Prix was about 1000 images for a two day event.

That ratio has worsened of late, I'm up to 75k photos on the hard disk and only about 12k photos on the website (not counting thumbnails).

Or another way: of the images you keep, how many do you go back and look at again after more than a month?

I see that everyone has their own standard in what they call a keeper.

On myself, I choose keepers in which I can happily present those shots to people , have them up for public view and/or make prints out of them. Usually what is self-considered 'high quality' photos.

I keep EVERYTHING !!!
And as for 'good keepers' - that's a relative term ... if I get a semi decent shot of something, I'm happy, cos I take so many shit photos LOL ..... and if I get a better shot of something rare, or something I've never seen before (and am unlikely to see often in the future), I'm ecstatic