Keepers.....

sean000 wrote:

Keeper rate doesn't matter much to me. Back in the film days (when I wasn't shooting much anyway), I was very careful about reaching for that shutter button. At the time I couldn't afford a nice camera, and I could barely afford to get lots of film processed. I wasn't as into photography back then either, so quite often I would take one photo of a given subject. Just the one. If it sucked, it sucked. Of course I tried my darndest to make sure that one photo counted. I remember a backpacking trip to Alaska with my brother in 1995. I shot way too many rolls of film and I didn't get the last one developed until about six or eight months later. I would say my keeper rate was pretty good for being an inexperienced photographer with a mediocre camera, but I also got a little excited and took way too many photos of the same subject, even if I was often happy with the results.

When I started using digital, I fired away like crazy so I could learn more about using the gear and about photography in general. I will still do this in situations where I'm not entirely comfortable that I know how to get the best shot. I will experiment a lot more than I would have with film. Being more experienced these days, I don't shoot nearly as many takes as I did six or eight years ago. Even if you aren't paying to have the shots developed, you still have to sift through them... which takes time and gets tedious. I also ask myself more often these days, "Do I really need a photo of that?" or "Do I really need ANOTHER photo of that?" Sometimes I know I've already got a better photo of a given subject than the current lighting situation would deliver anyway.

These days most of my photos are of my 2-year-old daughter and my 5-month-old son. I'm shooting a lot of very low light shots, often trying to capture a particular expression or activity. I don't typically use burst shots... I just try to nail the timing and the focus. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. Kids expressions change quickly. Plus I have so many photos of these kids already, that I really don't want to keep mediocre shots when I have so many better ones. So for them my standards of what to keep are higher.

I use Lightroom to cull the herd, immediately flagging for rejection/deletion anything that's not worth keeping. I don't care about the ratio. In fact I get some satisfaction out of deleting as many as possible, so I can focus on the good stuff. I usually know why a shot didn't work. If I'm not sure why, then I might keep it so I can try to learn from it. Then I rate what's left. If the photo isn't above average, then I think about deleting it as well. I do keep a lot of average photos because they are either the only photos I have of a particular subject, or they have some kind of historical or personal value for our family. But my main goal is to make sure the best photos don't get buried in a sea of mediocrity. That can easily happen when you shoot digital.

Sean