How many shots do you take?

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JamesE1978

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James
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As I'm just coming back to photography, and memory is cheap, how many shots do you take on average when you go out shooting?

I find I'm not taking as many as I would like as thinking about having to sift through them all on the PC later...

Would be interested to know what you shoot and a typical amount. I'm thinking the bird shooting will win here...

As a slight aside, do you keep everything on one card for one shoot or split them? I'm thinking of giving motorsport a go and my current card can hold 1.6k photos. Would be pretty gutted if I lost the lot with a card failure...
 
On a recent street photography workshop I shot around 360 during the day, probably the most I’ve ever done.
I have edited down to 140ish with still more to get rid of, this editing process has taken 4/5 weeks
on the second question I have never had a card failure, touch wood
 
0-100 or so.

I've never had a card totally fail but I have lost a couple of shots mysteriously.
 
gjhill said:
On a recent street photography workshop I shot around 360 during the day, probably the most I’ve ever done.
I have edited down to 140ish with still more to get rid of, this editing process has taken 4/5 weeks
on the second question I have never had a card failure, touch wood
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Yeah that's what worries me - spending weeks sifting through the shots - although I could probably edit them at work.
 
JamesE1978 said:
Yeah that's what worries me - spending weeks sifting through the shots - although I could probably edit them at work.
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I don't get why people fret about sifting the wheat from the chaff. It's easy and quick to do in a program like Lightroom. So long as you know what makes a decent picture and you're ruthless.

I also think that it's part of the whole photography 'thing'.

If you don't like doing it you maybe better off taking up knitting. :D

As always, JMO YMMV.
 
Ed Sutton said:
I don't get why people fret about sifting the wheat from the chaff. It's easy and quick to do in a program like Lightroom. So long as you know what makes a decent picture and you're ruthless.

I also think that it's part of the whole photography 'thing'.

If you don't like doing it you maybe better off taking up knitting. :D

As always, JMO YMMV.
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Hahaha - problem is I'm still learning and sometimes I ponder too much about whether a shot is decent... And sometimes I'm too ruthless. Also I haven't got Light room yet - I'm messing with darktable as its free. But I understand what you are saying. Hopefully as my skills improve in shooting, so will my skills in skimming through them.
 
I'm not quick to delete pictures as I try and remember that I must have seen something otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I keep them for a while and look at them over time and often I do see why I took them, and some become favourites. I only delete if I don't see anything worth keeping after looking at them over a period of time.
 
woof woof said:
I'm not quick to delete pictures as I try and remember that I must have seen something otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I keep them for a while and look at them over time and often I do see why I took them, and some become favourites. I only delete if I don't see anything worth keeping after looking at them over a period of time.
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I'm deliberately giving it a few days after shooting before I review.
 
JamesE1978 said:
Hahaha - problem is I'm still learning and sometimes I ponder too much about whether a shot is decent... And sometimes I'm too ruthless. Also I haven't got Light room yet - I'm messing with darktable as its free. But I understand what you are saying. Hopefully as my skills improve in shooting, so will my skills in skimming through them.
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I tried LR and hated it. It seemed to be more of a cataloging and viewing tool to me with a photo editor tucked away in a corner. I used CS5 for years but recently crumbled and signed up for the subscription version, now CS2023.
 
woof woof said:
I'm not quick to delete pictures as I try and remember that I must have seen something otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. I keep them for a while and look at them over time and often I do see why I took them, and some become favourites. I only delete if I don't see anything worth keeping after looking at them over a period of time.
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That too. But if you have three very similar shots of one subject it's usually simple to get rid of at least one, usually two.
 
Ed Sutton said:
That too. But if you have three very similar shots of one subject it's usually simple to get rid of at least one, usually two.
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Well, if that's what you do I see your point, ditto motion blur, out of focus shots and other things which can be quickly seen.
 
I keep nearly all.

I don't take many bad shots, and take even less good ones :)

It is surprising how often I've needed a shot after some years, that logically I should never have saved.

I use FastStone for going through images, have a good file structure, and haven't found an image management programme that makes things any easier.

I have had 3 cards fail in the last 22 years, but lost nothing, always copy to hard drive, and have 4 backups.
 
It very much depends on what & where & the time of day.

Shooting digital & silent shutter it's not like there's any cost or wear & tear to really worry about. But I certainly don't shoot hundreds. The thought of sifting through them all in LR is terrifying! :ROFLMAO: I would walk around a little village or go for a single sunrise scene & I'd guess at an average being somewhere around 20 or so images.

As an EDIT - I certainly don't keep them all though. I will go through the sunrise one's for example and maybe pick out one or two with different colours/clouds to edit & the rest will just simply go in the bin.

I also like to sit on images for a while. I'm probably a good week or two behind from shooting time to social media time. I like to revisit images just to final tweak them or delete them once the excitement of the shoot has worn off.
 
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Photographers habits ........ i only shoot jpegs for some reasons . Don't shoot raw because i am not a fan of post processing . A little maybe .... here and there . Thinking a lot before pressing the shutter button . A 16gb is enough for my needs . If anything goes wrong ( never happened so far ) the losses are equal to 16gb max .
Usually i transfer one or two images via an OTG cable to my cellphone and to my Google account . A light touch of post processing on the fly , whites , blacks , shadows ...... some croping if necessary and that's it .
A typical photography promenade contains 30 shots ....... 40 ......
As for the potentional risk of card failure ........ que sera sera ........
 
It depends on what I am shooting - if I am covering a mountain bike race, I could take a few thousand images. If I am just out with the camera I may only take 2 or 3 images. I try not to take a shot unless I know it is going to be a decent one.
 
At an airshow, I would typically shoot around 1000 photos, weddings, carnivals likewise but a day out doing street about 50-100.
 
For me it all depends on which style or genre I'm shooting. Lately I've been doing a bit of ICM, I may spend 10-15 minutes stood in one place taking photos of the same thing (50 odd shots). Just because it's all a bit hit and miss. If I'm taking still life images it might be 10-15 shots.
I do keep most of the shots, but will every now and then have a big clear out of Lightroom.
 
It really does depend on what I'm shooting and why. On an average birding day I'll shoot something between 500 and 1000, of which maybe 50 will make it as far as Lightroom. Yesterday at the Shuttleworth Collection air display I shot 2035 images (and 1 video). My first run through has gotten that down to 1100 and by the time I've finished culling I'll import and edit maybe 75(ish) in Lightroom.

If I'm just out with the camera I don't take too many. I apply the principle that Matt Kloskowsi uses and before clicking the shutter I ask myself "why am I taking this image"?

My culling routine normally has two passes through - first to get rid of the blurred/out of focus shots and second to remove the similar looking images. Quite a lot of "good" images get binned but as I have multiple copies of every raw file I've shot right back to when I bought my first DSLR in 2008 I can always revisit them should I need to. It has happened once or twice. As has been said many times before storage is cheap (although it hasn't always been so).
 
I recently visited a park that had a load of ducks and swans including cygnets and a few squirrels, i took over 1.2k of pictures all together, yes going through them took a day or so and there were many that had to be discarded because the subject had moved or was out of focus, but i think i would have been unhappy if i had took less and missed out on "that" shot..
As for the risk of losing photos i transfer everything to a external hard drive where i can then go through things at a much later time, i also use luminar neo to sort through and edit my photos.

I think at the end of day just take as many photos as you feel you need to in order to get the photos that you want
 
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I predominantly shoot sports so firing the shutter button in short bursts at 30fps it can all add up. It can vary depending on the game i.e football, rugby or cricket etc but I take between 700-1200 a game and I do delete plenty in between the action.
When shooting such rapid burst the images are very similar so when I edit them in
Lightroom I cull them heavily and only pick one or two in each sequence. I have been doing it for twelve years now and my workflow is a lot quicker than it used to be.
 
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I’ll often have hundreds from a shoot, as lots of them have people in.

Instead of culling bad ones, I go through a shoot picking the acceptable ones, giving them one star. I then repeat this pass picking the best of those and give them 2 stars. Then three and if needed four. Hardly ever need five.

What i find useful is that for the subsequent passes, I already know which are the better/best photos, so it is easier to discard the not so good ones later in the culling process. I can whittle 800 down to 20 in about 15/20 minutes. After a period of time I will delete the zero star shots completely, maybe even the 1 star ones.

I use this approach for sports, airshows, conferences, concerts, Street, VIP visits. Seems to work for them all!
 
If I'm out shooting sport it'll likely by 1000's of images.... if it's an event for friends then likely 6-700. If it's a portrait session, then close to 600 again. I also use faststone image viewer to cull quickly. - I've worked on several assignments that required daily delivery of images so I'm used to chomping through loads of images quickly, after a few days you'll quickly be more economical with the shutter .

I also try and do my edits the same day, otherwise I'll lose the enthusiasm to do it and I'll have thousands of images lying around doing nothing.

Every camera I have owned in the past 8 years has had 2 memory slots and I refuse to compromise on this requirement. Photography is my way to communicate with the world and I'd be devastated to lose images because of a simple oversight of dual slots etc. That said, I delete all my raws after processing and publishing and .... I rarely If ever, look back at my past work. But I'm odd like that haha
 
JamesE1978 said:
Also I haven't got Light room yet - I'm messing with darktable as its free.
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Try Irfanview for super-fast reviewing in a free application. You can't grade the images, but you can delete the junk. Eventually you will want a photo processing and management application because it just makes life easier.

How many pictures?

On holiday, 100-600 per day typically, same if just visiting somewhere new. For a friend's post - COVID wedding celebration about 1400 over 5 hours. If I'm revisiting a familiar place then 0-50.

We all see things differently. I used to shoot film, so a digital raw is my negative and the starting point for making a picture. That's quite different from some in the thread, and if your work needs a fast turnaround then jpg is the only option, though the automated processing in some software like On1 photoraw will turn out acceptable images equivalent to in-camera jpg processing too.

You were asking about cameras, so many now have dual card slots.
 
toohuge said:
I also try and do my edits the same day, otherwise I'll lose the enthusiasm to do it and I'll have thousands of images lying around doing nothing.
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I think this is an important point. Selecting images when you can still clearly remember the shoot.

Although I do chimp in the viewfinder, you don't get to see if an image is really sharp. However, from the shoot I will remember what I think should be a good shout - this goes back to film days, I had a pretty good idea of which frames in a roll were the ones to concentrate on.
 
The question doesn't distinguish the type of photography - 3 days at an airshow is a vastly different prospect to a day out landscape shooting. One produces thousands - the other only dozens.

However - culling has to be done coldly and quickly. You do this by editing in, not editing out. ie if you've already chosen an image you like - the half dozen almost identical images are obviously unnecessary. I don't shoot weddings any more - but when I did, I could cull a couple of thousand images in a couple of hrs. If it's taking longer than that - you're overthinking it.

I've said this before - but unacceptable photo's are a rarity with modern cameras - 30 years ago - I was editing out misfocussed or badly exposed images, nowadays I rarely shoot them - because I'm a little bit better - but mostly cos my camera is loads better.
 
Until the middle of 2019 or so, I was very much in a film mentality - odd to come home with more than 36 shots from a day. Then I went to the Isle of May for the first time and came back with 1600+. Since then I've erred on the side of "shoot now sort later"

So 200ish from a morning in the woods where the red squirrels live. Off out soon to see if the badgers are coming out to play tonight.

Sorting out on the PC is easier than chimping in the field (and doesn't have to all be done at one sitting)
 
On a days birding / wildlife anywhere between 200 to 1000 , silent shutter and high speed burst at 18fps .. just aquired a new 128gb high speed card today that shows just under a 6000 shot capacity
 
Depends on what I'm shooting. On day out, holiday etc maybe 100-200, entirely depends on where we are and what I find interesting to shoot. For covering a race meeting 1,000-2,000 per day, at least. So it could easily be 6.000 shots for a three day meeting.
 
L320Rio said:
Are you shooting professionally or as a hobby?
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Currently just as a hobby for myself but I have been accredited media in the past. If I'm covering a race meeting I like to move around a lot, shoot from as many different corners on the track as possible so I end up taking lots of photos
 
If we are talking about shooting for ourselves, then I would say it varies a LOT. This week I've maybe taken 15 shots? ish, over a few days. But depending on where and what I could shoot thousands in a day, although I'd guess a hundred or two would be closer to a sort of average.
For a job I favor two cards, but for me, mostly one, if I loose some odd shots of buildings or a sunset, yes it's a PITA but I can live with it, luckly cards dont fail that often for me.
I find I usually shoot upwards of 500 shots on a wedding. For that you want two cards ideally.
 
When out and about with a camera I may take no photographs at all.

I will normally assess whether a situation has potential before I shoot. Even after viewing though the finder the chances are that I will abort at that stage.
Even after a day out I may have no more than a dozen images, a majority of which will be keepers. So sorting, while necessary, is not a problem

First off, I check all the raw file images at full screen in Irfanview, and note which to process in ACR
I then move those files to a new folder for processing.

After which, and unlike most people, it is only then that I catalogue them in lightroom.


At my grandsons recent wedding, I took some 400 casual shots. Of these I have selected only about 40. Which for me is a very low keeper rate. But after looking through the official photographs, the ones that I kept seemed appropriate. And filled the gaps in their coverage or were more personal to me as I saw the occasion.
 
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I've had 3 memory cards fail over the years, but of course I was a pro who took a lot of shots, I doubt whether it is a real problem for most people.
My insurance against this has always been to use pro cameras that write to two cards simultaneously but in the early days of digital photography, when failure-prone microdrive cards were a much bigger failure problem, cameras could only take one card at a time and storage cost £1 per megabyte, it was just a case of shoot and hope for the best.

I still remember my first fashion shoot on digital - 9 shots per card and only 1 card, and very slow uploading to computer before I could go back to the shoot. I magically found that each product needed just 9 shots . . .
 
I shoot a fair bit of motorsport and usually use two systems (because I like to) and can clock up something like 2000+ images in a day, I do then to cull lots that are out of focus, missed the subject etc so can bin upto 70-80% which I don't mind. It might seem a lot but I know people who will shoot many, many more in a day.

On holiday usually less than 100.

Just depends on what I am shooting :)
 
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I think a lot of this entirely depends on whether you're a pro or an amateur.

Pros quickly realise that any time not earning is time wasted if you're just sorting out pics. So either use a 'shoot fewer' system or become super ruthless at the sorting stage.

I am very far from being a pro and I am massively guilty of overshooting stuff. Maybe not so much these days, but certainly at the start of my digital journey. If I go on a week's holiday, I can easily come back with 1,500 shots.

If I'm taking shots of people, I'll almost always take two or three to compensate for things like closed eyes as well as the inevitable cries of "I hate that shot of me" from my wife and/or daughter.

My system for grading them uses the smart filters built in to LR, you can grade everything by 1-5 stars as well as by one of four colours. But only 5-star ratings and red colour ratings have built-in smart filters. So it saves time having to set up another one for blue, or for 1* for example.

Any duplicates get a 5* or red rating - or are left unrated. The 5* gets a full edit. Then I copy and paste those setting to the red version. I save the 5* at highest resolution JPEG, and I save the reds to a separate folder at a max files size of, for example, 5MB. The unrated duplicates get deleted.

I tend to work through chronologically, rather than do a full pass of the entire catalogue. Which is probably not the best way to do this - might be quicker all round to get rid of the dross in one hit then concentrate on editing, but it is what it is...

I've not tried any other cataloguing system so have nothing to compare LR to. And I quite enjoy the process. But if I was doing it professional, I think I'd try another system of being able to view and cull before getting home. Syncing to an iPad for example.

I work for an ad agency, and when when we've worked with pro-photographers in the past, they'll normally shoot a burst and we will sit by a monitor as they come in and grade them on the spot. Literally yes, no and maybe.
 
JamesE1978 said:
As I'm just coming back to photography, and memory is cheap, how many shots do you take on average when you go out shooting?

I find I'm not taking as many as I would like as thinking about having to sift through them all on the PC later...

Would be interested to know what you shoot and a typical amount. I'm thinking the bird shooting will win here...

As a slight aside, do you keep everything on one card for one shoot or split them? I'm thinking of giving motorsport a go and my current card can hold 1.6k photos. Would be pretty gutted if I lost the lot with a card failure...
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I think the number of pictures you take is down to circumstances. I can't speak for sports (though as a teenager, I photographed motor sports at Ingleston in Edinburgh) , but I would think the key thing is to get the shot, and you just take as many as the circumstances dictate: culling out the ones that aren't worth keeping.

The nearest I get to sports photography is with bird photography, where there can be long gaps with nothing to photograph, so not as intensive as sports, and I'm reasonably selective about when I press the shutter. I tend to use only short short bursts (@10fps) and I have only ever come close to 1000 pictures in a day on rare occasions. I feel that around 500 is my average, and some days I might come back with nothing, or only a handful.

My main interest is landscape and I can take anything from one to a maximum of 100 images (occasionally more, but on average probably 20-30), but the higher number usually includes some focus or exposure bracketing (maybe a pano) or some experiments with choice of aperture, focussing point, or exposure. Nearly always on a tripod, sometimes a monopod, very occasionally hand held.

I also do what I call opportunistic photography, which are usually occasions when photography isn't the reason to be out, e.g.visit with my wife to an historic garden, or visit to town etc, where again I might take from one to a hundred pictures (again, occasionally more, and again on average 20-30). Nearly always handheld, or sometimes with a monopod.

I'm pretty oblivious to the numbers I'm taking at the time as I'm just enjoying the experience of being out with my camera capturing something I enjoy doing, e.g wildlife watching or being in the landscape. This is one of the great things about digital, you don't need to be aware of the costs of film and chemicals, but it's also possibly it's downfall, as it's maybe too easy to just rattle of shots in the hope that with so many to choose from, one has got be a good one. I try to balance this by still trying to think through every photograph the way I did in the film days, while also to taking advantage of things like fast frame rates for bird photographs, to capture the moment, and "trying things out" more than I did in the film days, because it isn't costing me anything. Except time spent culling.

I cull (in PhotoMechanic or/and Fast Raw Viewer) by deleting the rubbish, giving 1 star to everything I want to keep (the 1 star is an indicator a file has been viewed and evaluated) and 2 stars for the ones I feel might end up being used for something. I can do this pretty quickly because I don't need to think that hard about it. I've tried it the other way of selecting only the good pictures, rather than rejecting the bad ones, and while I can see that working for some types of photography (e.g. weddings or portraits) it doesn't work for me with the kinds of photographs I take.

I auto-add metadata (e.g location and a primary keyword such as "landscape" or "animal" etc) on import, and then add species names into the metadata for all wildlife images. I also tidy up the keywords e.g. in amongst sixty landscape images I might have five bird pictures, so while adding the species data, I'll also change the auto added key word from "Landscape" to "Animal". Every Image gets at least one keyword (I have 15 standard keywords, like Landscape, Animal, People, Transport, Urban etc) to help searching.

I could, in addition to the 1-star and 2-star ratings, try and select "portfolio" images or whatever you want to call them and make them 3-star or 5-star,, but this takes too much time and at this stage I want to get and initial cull done quickly and the core metadata sorted.

I enjoy the culling, it's always exciting to see the images that worked out as I had hoped for, the experiments that failed so I feel I've learned something, the serendipitous shot that might well turn out to be one of the best pictures I've made etc.

Although, I use Photo Mechanic and Fast Raw Viewer for culling, I also use Lightroom and Capture One and there are other tools that people have mentioned, all of which are designed to speed up culling, and worth learning.

Personally, I think this first cull is one of the best parts of digital photography, which rather than dreading, I still get excited about., But I also get excited when I first put a file into Photoshop, and when I make that final tweak of the tripod head and the composition suddenly comes together, so maybe I'm just easily excited :)
 
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