What is your % of really good photos?

Before you can decide if you are successfuk, you need to define success.

And yes, success is a word with some flexibility.

My friend Bob is just back from a week in Jamaica. He's got a couple of cameras and several lenses and a good tripod, and loves taking pictures. We have not spoken, but he's sent me seven shots.

Bob doesn't entertain a lot, and is not the type of man make guests sit in front of the TV for a 30min slide show.

I think that success for Bob's Jamaica trip can be defined as coming back with three images to print and frame and hang on the wall in the living room, reminding him and Mrs Bob of the good time they had on their vacation.

And it doesn't matter if he shot thirty frames, or a thousand. He got the three he needed. Success.

What does success mean for a pro?

First, you need to understand that "pros" covers a huge range of photography.

And success varies by category.

For piano-picture photos, success is one frame that can be run through Portrait Professional.

For a clothing web site photographer, it's 40 properly sized, accurately colored, wrinkless-subject, files e-mailed to a web designer.

Once the first shot is perfected, he may shoot only three frames each of the next 39 subjects. Success.

On the HiFi Channel Friday night, there was a great feature about an artist using the giant Polaroid in New York. He was taking pictures of statues of baseball players, making slight changes to positioning and changing focus to get the exact work of art he wanted. There we giant test prints pinned to the wall. At least 15 tests of his photo of the statues of Jackie Robinson stealing home, with Yogi Berra at the plate.

Then he made 5 good shots for the limited edition. So maybe 3 tests for every success.

Me? I mostly shoot editorial portraits and editorial features for print and web sites. A lot of the time when I shoot, I don't have a precise application in mind. I shot over 100 head and shoulder pictures of a woman the other day, but she had three changes of clothes, there were tight shots and shots that included her hands, and there were vertical and horizontal framings. When it came time to prepare a postal walk card and put her on the web site, we had lots of frames to pick from. Success, and if you do the math (which is a silly concept her) 1 out of 50.

I ended up the other day at a terribly managed event before I was to shoot some portraits, both in the same office. I walked through the office, camera around my neck, to see what was going on at a presentation ceremony, and grabbed four frames in about ten seconds. One became a magazine cover. Ten minutes later, I was shooting during another presentation in front of a group, and got four more frames, one of which ran in the same magazine.

So success was two frames out of eight.

Other times, I do have a good idea. For  example, I used to work for an editor who would tell me the broad content he wanted ("I need the girl, her brother and sister and parents") without being too specific about what they looked like.  But he ws specific about shape. Full page wide, quarter page deep. Or half page wide, quarter page high, etc.

Weddings? What's the deliverable? Set a camera on slow clickety-click and put nine photos out of nine taken in three seconds into a DVD, but through away anther 2500 taken the same day.

BAK