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What's Your Keeper : Discard Ratio?


Daniel81

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2 hours ago, LocalHero1953 said:

Do a google image search for Robert Frank 'The Americans', Alec Soth 'Sleeping by the Mississippi' or almost any other classic contemporary photobook. How many of those shots, individually, would you call a 5-star keeper?

Rpbert Frank's contact sheets take up 80 pages in the thick volume "Looking In," curated by Sarah Greenough when he donated all his materials from that period of his life to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  But it seems that he shot roughly 800 rolls of film to obtain the 83 images in The Americans, so the 80 pages represent roughly the number of rolls from which selects were taken..  There were several edits done before the final selection, and there have been alternate versions of a few of the pictures.  Greenough selects about 8 of the images to show before the title page.  Hugh Edwards exhibited 36 of these pictures about a year before the book appeared.  If I had this material and walls enough, I think more than half of the pictures in The Americans would stand alone, rewarding repeated viewing. 

Edited by scott kirkpatrick
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I tend to shoot my digital cameras like I would shoot my film cameras - no spray and pray for me. So I can shoot maybe 200-300 shots on a week long trip, depending on the subjects, etc. (on a recent trip to Spain, I shot 5 rolls of film, so not too much more when I shoot digital).

The temptation with digital is always, "let's see what that would look like as a photo", which on one hand can be good, but often is just an excuse to "take a shot because I've got this damned camera hanging from my neck".

Keeper rate? 10%-15%. One or two of which I might consider worthy of a print or showing to people. 

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1 hour ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

Rpbert Frank's contact sheets take up 80 pages in the thick volume "Looking In," curated by Sarah Greenough when he donated all his materials from that period of his life to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.  But it seems that he shot roughly 800 rolls of film to obtain the 83 images in The Americans, so the 80 pages represent roughly the number of rolls from which selects were taken..  There were several edits done before the final selection, and there have been alternate versions of a few of the pictures.  Greenough selects about 8 of the images to show before the title page.  Hugh Edwards exhibited 36 of these pictures about a year before the book appeared.  If I had this material and walls enough, I think more than half of the pictures in The Americans would stand alone, rewarding repeated viewing. 

I don't doubt that Frank (and others) selected only a tiny franction of the images they shot. My point is that few of what they did select work as standalone images, and are actually intended to work together with others.

I suppose my broader point is that a simple keeper/discard division is not helpful. Depending on what you are taking photographs for, you might choose to keep quite a lot, even though many are close duplicates, and then pick just one of them to fulfil your purpose.

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For me, I think the calculation is too complicated to make. Its not as simple how many I take to a final state, versus how many I don't. That tends to be a very low ratio, 1 in hundreds.  When I go out, I might shoot from a couple to a two dozen different scenes, with anywhere from a single capture to potentially a few dozen of each.  For any given subject, I might do several exposures of varying DoF or EV level depending on the complexity of the light and repeat that process across any number of  angles and perspectives. Some shutter presses are occasionally accompanied by me audibly commenting something to the effect, that was crap, others, I know thats the one, still others I think maybe, lets try this other angle instead and I'll sort it all out in post. 

So for me the only reasonable measure is scene based. My goal is to produce something that I think is worthwhile whenever I decide something is important enough to take the effort to shoot. To me, its only a failure, if when processing, I come away with nothing I feel good enough about. These days most of the failures are related to the scene not being interesting enough in the end to bother taking to completion. But it is rare that I dont get many usable shoots of something that is. All too often the problem is trying to decide which variant is the best one, not that I had missed it completely. Often, its a toss up in my mind, so force myself to make a decision, pick one and move on. 

One other point difficulty for honestly assessing my hit rate is that I am for the most part what I would term an aleatory photographer. While I do shoot events and such, more typically I religiously shoot every weekend in parts unknown, randomly roaming around all over New England looking for something interesting. I take any number of 'remembrance' shots, purely to note the location as a visual reminder that I should revisit this spot at another time. Thus I have a lot of things in my library never intended to be a final piece of work, but more a sketch of what I might be able to get when the weather is better or worse, in summer rather than winter,  at dawn with eastern light or dusk with western, etc...

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Back in the film days, I would probably take around 200 slide exposures on a 14 day trip abroad, after which I would keep around 50%. In the digital age I have probably doubled my output on a similar trip, but retain around 30%. If I am out on a day’s walk at the weekend, I probably take no more than 20 images and keep less than half. I try to remain disciplined and true to my film-day way of working, so am pretty ruthless with in-camera deleting at the point of reviewing. For me, there is also argument for further ‘pruning’ several months after some sessions as some images considered worthy when I took them, loose their impact. So every now and again I have a sneaky dump of some of them 😄

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Back in the film days I would be happy if I got one real good one of the roll of 36. Usually, I would get a contact sheet first and then pick the ones I wanted printed, sometimes between 5 or 10 on a lucky roll.

On the digital camera, I shoot a lot more frames than in the film days as I didn't have much money for that then.

I have been thinking about getting Photo Mechanic because my workflow isn't working so well and with my up coming SL2 (tomorrow he-he) and it's 47mpx I'll have to pay more attention to a system.

Just trying different takes never mind sometimes using  drive low drive speed it's not hard to get a lot of frames. plus now that I have the camera they are all free.

Culling seems to be my biggest challenge and to date I have just kept them all and there are so many frames still unprocessed and I know many are not keepers and I hope to get to them one day.

Any workflow suggestions welcome or links to is a good discussion would appreciated. 

One of my favourite pastimes is going back to a days shots and reviewing and processing them in Lightroom.

It never fails to make happy and appreciate my Leica gear as it always seems to do what I ask of it and I keep learning more of what to ask..

 

 

 

Edited by MarkinVan
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1 hour ago, Jeff S said:

It was a joke. Maybe it would have been more obvious if I had written 5.624%.

Jeff

really ? 

I thought it was possibly bullshit but exodies says it never is. 

now I'm confused...... well possibly 50% confused.

I'm not sure if that's significant, though ......

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9 minutes ago, thighslapper said:

really ? 

I thought it was possibly bullshit but exodies says it never is. 

now I'm confused...... well possibly 50% confused.

I'm not sure if that's significant, though ......

5.624% of statistics are bs 22.775% of the time.  More obvious now?

Jeff

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1 minute ago, Jeff S said:

5.624% of statistics are bs 22.775% of the time.  More obvious now?

Jeff

Not really. Perhaps Exodies can explain further. 

All this bullshit statistics malarkey will probably drive me to drink ..... I reckon there's a 30% chance +/- 5%.

ps.

As medical students we were taught statistics by professor Joseph Rotblat, who was a Polish Nuclear Scientist involved on the Manhattan Project and post war was active in bringing about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty as the result of what he had helped create horrified him. He had a thick accent and was wholly unsuited to teaching wayward medical students with no interest in statistics at all. Each week we were set homework which was submitted the following week. As we were all clueless we relied on copying from the few who allegedly understood statistics or had done some at school. As the weeks passed, no homework was returned and he became noticeably more agitated and short tempered. Finally at week 6 he announced. "I have analysed the results of the homework, and have concluded that it is not statistically possible that so many students could have arrived at the same wrong answers. I must regretfully conclude that there has been cheating. This must stop ! "

That's why he had the Nobel Prize and I've never won anything more than £5 on the lottery. 

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The subject of "keepers" is subjective to me. I keep about 75% of my photos, not because they are excellent but because it helps me assess my quality of work and compare the images . It's helped me along the way and I probably have about a 15% to 20% keeper rate for those that I find competent.

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  • 1 month later...

I enjoyed this conversation very much.  Thank you to everyone.  Obviously there is no single answer.  I was just watching this last night and wanted to share it.  This guy travels all over, invests HUGE amounts of money and time, puts himself in dangerous situations, puts his cameras in perilous remote-controlled settings, AND towards the end of the video admits a GOOD year for him, might be 4 or 6 good images!!!  That really speaks to me.  Its how I am drawn to work . . . . . 

 

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