[sebberry]

How many of your photos turn out the way you want them to? How many get thrown away on the "cutting room floor"?

I feel like I am wasting the shutter life of my camera sometimes, treating it too much like a P&S instead of the photographic tool that it is. Result is that many of my photos turn out really amateurish and I only get a small handful worth keeping.

[kcmadr]

Well, not every picture I compose is wonderful, but they usually turn out the way I expect them to. I would say about 8 out of 10 turn out the way I expect them to. One in about twenty turn out a heck of a lot better (excellent IMO), and one in about fifty really and truly disappoint me.

I find the more time, thought, effort, and patience I give to recording an image, the better it turns out.

But that's just me.

[newmikey]

So you want honesty hey?

I'd say about 1 in 8 for me, but I'm always playing around with new (vintage) lens combinations and PP. I suppose that with an all-automatic DA lens line-up the ratio would increase, but this is more fun!

[RawheaD]

I think it depends on what I'm shooting, and how I'm shooting it.

I've recently got back to shooting film, and certainly, because of the cost & effort of development, I spend way much more time taking one shot, and the "success rate" is much higher than shots taken with my K20D.

However, for that very reason, there is no way that I could take a photo like:







with my film camera.



Or, like this that I took last night:








I think that one was like one that I liked out of 100 shots or so




But, even with digital, if you know what you want to take and know how to take it (which does, obviously, take practice), all you need is one shot.





OK, that's actually 4 shots, but that's because I needed 4 to stitch together to make it. I had absolutely no time at all, so I set my tripod down, set up the pano head and camera (sorry folks, that was a 5D), took one shot in Av mode to get proper shutter speed, then took those 4 shots in Manual mode without any retakes.



But you are right, and this is something I've learned fairly recently and have been telling myself; you do want to get out of that "Shoot as many as you can and pick a good one" mentality of P&Ss. In most cases when you do that, you just end up with many many crap. Since I just moved over from a P&S to a DSLR last summer, I've been training my trigger-happy finger to take a deep breath and wait before firing off. I'm getting better at it, and the "success rate" is definitely going up :-D

[VaughnA]

I'm still learning and I'm getting better but I take a LOT of pictures and get a few good ones. But it depends on the situation. If I'm shooting birds at the feeder I'll peel of a lot of shots because they are moving their heads and I'm trying to get the right angle. If I'm shooting flowers I get a pretty high percentage of keepers, probably 3 in 10 which for me is good. When I'm out taking scenics on my bike I'll try to take a few different angles and exposures to try to learn something and toss a lot of them. I do need to slow down and get out of that 'even a blind chicken finds the grain' mentality.

[dosdan]

I took 155 RAW shots yesterday of an U7 Soccer match. Out of these, 80 were judged suitable for uploading to Picasaweb. I'm really only happy with 3 of these. The game was not that interesting and not as dynamic as I'd hoped. (There was only 6 players on our team - wearing the orange tops this time - there was no substitutions, with our other two players sick - out of the 6 playing, 2 were not 100% well either.) The rest are for the parents of the other players of both teams, but the 3 below interest me. The difficulties are:

• Shadows in some parts of the playing field
• OOF generally, sometimes the focus point is not the group. Centre-point focus is not the answer either as the action I want is not always dead-centre of the shot.
• OOF for some members of a group (I'm using a DA 55-300/F4 with ISO 560, F8, AV mode with shutter speed between 1/500s-1/1500s - F8 at 220-300mm FL does not give you much DOF)
• Player/s turned the wrong way or an official in the way.
• Boring/static shot

Sometimes though it comes together and you get the unexpected shot. Often though I don't realise it until afterwards as I am too busy tracking the ball & action during the match to notice the players' expressions. But it's the challenge that interests me. If it was just a matter of pointing & shooting it would soon get boring.








Actually, the photos from the previous Saturday's match were more exciting, although technically flawed. I'm prepared to be more lenient if the action or the drama's in the shot! Give me shots of fear, joy, determination, anguish.























Dan.

[code4code5]

I had occasion to shoot a couple of events this week that, although I wish they didn't have to happen, I was glad I was able to document them. I shot about 200 pictures on Wednesday and another ~200 on Friday. I ended up with 161 shots that I found were worth processing, and about 60 of the best that were good enough to put into a slideshow set to music that I will distribute to my coworkers and the family. I'm quite pleased with the results, and found that I was taking more shots than necessary to make sure that I got the image that I wanted to capture.

The events were three flag ceremonies, a full honor viewing, and a full honor funeral. One of the guys that I worked with who passed away after a long and difficult battle with lukemia. I will post some photos when I get the chance, but my Internet connection is really sketchy right now and my only portal is through my iPhone.

[Digitalis]

I would say four out of five on average...I shoot the same subject, I alter the lens focal length, the framing. the main reasons why I throw images out is because of compositional flaws, I don't have many problems with the technical side of things.

but these days i'm pressuring myself to get everything right in one shot, and so far I have had more success by doing that.

i'm particularly happy with this image because I have finally mastered visually judging the exposure for f/1.2 lenses - which are far more efficient at gathering light that our own eyes. I got this image in one shot...I pre-set the focus and on a f/1.2 lens DOF at even moderate distances is small.

1/125s @f/1.2 Iso 100

[Canada_Rockies]

The good sports shot ratio I was trained to do is 2/36. Two shots good enough to be published per 36 exposure roll. It took several months before I got one printed. Two weekends ago I took twelve (12) exposures with the k10d. Two were good enough, and one was so unique I kept it despite the quality (Canada Goose nesting on top of a power pole - she stole an Osprey's nest). The weather was such that 1/320@9.5, ISO 800 was the best I could do with the 400 + 1.7X.

[roentarre]

For me, 1 in 40 or so works.

[wildman]

1:20 - keepers
1:100 - exceptional

[Ash]

Same here... probably lots of keepers (not so much in fast-action situations), and very few forever/timeless/jaw dropping shots.

[wildman]

Same here... probably lots of keepers (not so much in fast-action situations), and very few forever/timeless/jaw dropping shots.

I will revise my list:

1:20 keepers
1:100 exceptional
1:1000 "jaw droppers" - interestingly, for me at least, jaw droppers have always been mostly the result of dumb luck rather than skill or art on my part. I didn't even know I had a jaw dropper until I saw the frame's potential on the monitor. I have over 3000 shots in my archive and off the top of my head no more than 15-20 are "jaw droppers".

[NaClH2O]

I agree with wildman. About 1 in 20 of mine are worth keeping, about 1 in 100 I post up on my Smugmug site and about 1 in 1000 gets printed big and hung on the wall.

NaCl(some of the 1:1000 are pure luck, some are skill + luck, none are pure skill)H2O