What's Your Keeper : Discard Ratio?

[lx1713]

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If a client continues using me, I'm doing something right particularly if it's for decades of working together 🙂

For what it's worth (not very much in my opinion), a 2 hour event, 600 shots, 200 keepers ~ about 30%. 15 hour event, 3000+ shots, 1500 keepers ~ 50%. I count because I used to be a workflow engineer 😆

A portraits session of 30 minutes, 150 shots, 10% - 80%. Some people are easier for me, some are harder.

Weddings : 1200 - 3000 shots, 50% thereabouts.

Commercial shoots is too variable for me to take note.

Here's the nub, I don't keep nor cull them specially for my pleasure, I back it up and just keep them. I don't cull very tightly because the use of images can be very broad. Marketing, PR, Finance, CEO, client services all have different approaches to how the images are used. Not to say cropping and post production use. In a corporate environment, sometimes simple shots are used as fillers. Nothing grand or spectacular or even exciting. Just fillers but it's all about the client not stock grabbed from a generic agency.

Personally, I haven't kept much for portfolio use for the last 5-10 years but I do have them backed up. So perhaps 5% very, very good shots. I feel the thrill of a good shot but I quite enjoy my clients pleasure as much.

[scott kirkpatrick]

Thinking back a bit, in the film days there was a 1% elite who left for distant places with huge boxes of film, mailed back to Life or NatGeo or..., and those would produce a steady stream but small numbers of published images.  Especially with color, those lucky folks didn't lose sleep over the cost of processing, or spend time in the darkroom unless their obsessions drove them there (Smith, Davidson, Maier).  Maybe the 10 per cent crowd bought their Tri-X by the 100 foot roll and developed in 8 reel tanks. (Robert Frank fits in there somewhere, as he did his own processing during his still image period.)  But drug store labs used to see rolls of film with Christmas pictures at each end, and a whole summer in between.  I think at each stage in the population, digital has made it easier to shoot more and try more things, but the same spectrum still exists.  Now the limiting factor is the cost at looking at an image in good enough shape to see what it says.  Except on Instagram, of course, where there are no limits.

[lx1713]

10 hours ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

Thinking back a bit, in the film days there was a 1% elite who left for distant places with huge boxes of film, mailed back to Life or NatGeo or..., and those would produce a steady stream but small numbers of published images.  Especially with color, those lucky folks didn't lose sleep over the cost of processing, or spend time in the darkroom unless their obsessions drove them there (Smith, Davidson, Maier).  Maybe the 10 per cent crowd bought their Tri-X by the 100 foot roll and developed in 8 reel tanks. (Robert Frank fits in there somewhere, as he did his own processing during his still image period.)  But drug store labs used to see rolls of film with Christmas pictures at each end, and a whole summer in between.  I think at each stage in the population, digital has made it easier to shoot more and try more things, but the same spectrum still exists.  Now the limiting factor is the cost at looking at an image in good enough shape to see what it says.  Except on Instagram, of course, where there are no limits.

Yes. Digital is a lovely step forward. Allowing us to try more things is exactly the way we should look at it. An internal "Keepers scorecard" keeps your senses keen but it's really just one gauge to keep your edge sharp and ready. A short stint as a photojournalist taught me that I might shoot lots but usually only one is used. Even then, it's how important the picture is to the story. And occasionally, it warrants an expansion where 10- 20 pictures is used. The limiting factor is actually time. Who views it and how much time will be devoted to it. 

[scott kirkpatrick]

On 1/26/2020 at 8:28 PM, thighslapper said:

....

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

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

It depends on the variation of your confusion from day to day.  If you are normally only 25% confused, this could be significant.  But if you swing from 0% to 100% in the course of a typical day or week, it's not.