DSLRUsers.com

I was perusing the d100 forum on dpreview and came across a thread that I found interesting, about keeper rates.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read. ... e=12870798

Of course, a lot of it depends on the type of shooting you do. I'd expect a very high keeper rate when shooting under controlled conditions, such as in a studio or perhaps weddings, where your experience and skills and equipment are maximized and you are in your comfort zone.

OTOH, most amateurs seem to shoot targets of opportunity and are much less prone to have the experience, skill levels and equipment necessary to do a given type of shot. Moving subjects in poor lighting and/or uncontrolled circumstances, seem to be typical targets of the average amateur.

For me, the keeper rate is probably around 10 to 20% of what I consider to be "good" shots. The percentage of "excellent" shots, meeting my own definition for excellence, is probably 1 or 2%.

The good thing about that system is that it's very subjective, so I can raise or lower the standard to make me happy.

mmm your right it very subjective to what your shooting.
for motorsports with panning i can ususally score 400-700/1000 shots which are technically good panned shots. then it goes down to half to perfectly aligned no chopped off parts of the car - submitting quality. then the may be just half of thoughs shots which are my favs which i may print off so yeah maybe 10percent . but in the end if i shot 1000 shots and only get one that i think is gold then i reckon it was still worth it.

great question...

I'd say I would be happy with maybe 10-20% of the shots I take (in relative focus and fair-good compostion), with a very low percentage as "WOW, I took that" kinda photos. I would class myself to be an aspiring amateur/hobbyist.

I think, like most things, the more you do it the better you become....the better you become the higher percentage of keepers. I guess it's all about being able to read the lighting situation and knowing what to set the camera to do in order to "capture the moment". Once you have that, composition falls into place and before you know it, you're frequenting galleries with your photos hanging up on the wall [we all wish] !

My keeper rate would be fairly low, maybe about 3%... At the same time, the fact it's free to shoot also means I'm more likely to do a lot of test shots for a posed shot or use continuous shooting (finger locked on the shutter) for spontaneous photos. I agree with redline that no matter how many pics you take, if you've got a top one then it's worth it!

Link.

Under controlled shooting conditions where I am shooting under instruction, my keeper rate is quite high around 70 to 80 percent, but when shooting for myself my keeper rate is quite low, around 1-3 percent
of exposed images. As I always shoot in raw, I tend to re-visit my rejects to see if a different crop, a different process of the raw file, to see if I can achive a different look applied to the images can be of any advantage

Cheers

big pix

My keepers are almost 100% but that's because I'm a hoarder.
Ask me what percentage I would be happy to show other people and the answer is closer to 1%

Henri Cartier-Bresson took thousands of shots, made hundreds of proof-sheets but had a very low "print it" count. That's the way he worked.

Some National Geographic photographers would shoot 300 rolls or more of Kodachrome in order to get 4 or 5 images into the magazine. That's the way they worked. I think it was Max Dupain who took one image and divided it up into about 20 different single images, and that's the way he worked.

Richard Avedon had been known for allowing his assistant to set up the camera, focus, and then Avedon would walk into the studio, quickly check the focus, fire the shutter and leave the room without saying a word. He charged $12000 bucks for that. That's the way he worked.

I guess whatever works for us is the way we operate. Hit count for street or hand held photography will diminish as image quality expectations rise.
I have a low hit count and have to work hard to compensate for it.

Hmm, I seem to remember a thread like this one a while ago on here. It's a good one though.

I use to snap away like an old snapping dog. Now I wait before I snap and look around. I find that the more I snap, the less focus I have. I try and imagine the frame and what I want to see in it, I think that alone drives efficiency rate way up. Sometimes I'm walking with people and my camera and they're like, "hey dave, this would make a good picture" and I look at it and I just know that it's a stinker and I don't take it (yup, kind of A-hole of me) out of principle. recently however I was trying to get a shot of some trees. My friend says check this out http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=6495540&size=o and sure enough it was the pic I was looking for, so you never know.
I'd say I was once about 20% and now I'm more like 40%. There are different categories though, some are pics that you blow up and print, some you keep on your computer for a rainy day, some you post, some you throw out. I generally only throw out blurred out of focus, or uninteresting, the rest I keep and get rid of them later.