Ratio of keepers to throw aways ?

I consider myself a serious amateur photographer and this is probably a stupid question but I would like to ask anyways and get others opinions. What is the ratio of keeper photographs as compared to the ones that go into the trash.

For every 20 photos I shoot, I may consider two as keepers for a ratio of 1/10. Is this fairly usual or common ?

What is your experience ?

Thanks in advance for any and all replies.

It really depends on subject matter and photography style. Processing something like simple team headshots I can do about 100% keeper on the production photos after I get everything setup and dialled in.

Compared to some wildlife outings where I can take dozens or hundreds of photos in an afternoon, then get back and decide that I don't want to bother keeping any of them.

A relevant recent thread. The question was different, but some people gave their keeper rates.

What do you shoot? Portrait rates should be higher, especially if you disregard duplicate poses etc. Wildlife and sports much lower because of the unpredictability. Landscape somewhere in the middke as you have control, but you also have the unpredictability of nature and weather etc. The rate really isnt important in the big picture but the number of keepers in the end.

Luckless wrote in post #17603876
It really depends on subject matter and photography style. Processing something like simple team headshots I can do about 100% keeper on the production photos after I get everything setup and dialled in.

Compared to some wildlife outings where I can take dozens or hundreds of photos in an afternoon, then get back and decide that I don't want to bother keeping any of them.

I agree.

I take mostly photos of family, friends, sports and events. I guess I'm probably my own best/worst critic as I know what I want to see in all my photos, good composition and tack sharp.

For me, when shooting portraits, the first 100 are usually just warming up me and relaxing the subject, then the next 100 have about 5 good ones and the last 50 have 20 keepers.

When you seek for a certain expression and moment, it really does not matter how many you take to obtain it. Main thing is that you know what you want.

Few thoughts:

1) Depends a lot on what you shoot; some situations its a LOT easier to get more keepers whilst in others its much harder. As said above a controlled portrait headshot situation its a near 100% whilst with an uncontrolled scene, lighting and subject like wildlife can rapidly drop the keeper rate.

2) It's good to know; good to improve on but not something to get obsessed over. I generally go by the view that so long as I've got more memory card space than I need then I'm good.

3) Your keeper rate will often decrease as you get better. This is because your standards for what you think is good/bad rises (typically) far faster than your actual ability and as such you can see it drop; but be mindful that now you might be dropping shots for much more minor reasons which in the past you would have overlooked.

4) People from "the film era" say film makes you get more keepers (or other statements to that effect) however it ignores two key points:
a) Shoot and check histogram exposure is a valid approach to digital shooting and one many of us make use of; that will instantly lower your keeper rate if your taking such test shots.

b) In the film era you might take less shots. Because you paid for every one people were typically far less inclined to "waste" shots on chances as often as they are today when digital lets you have free shots. So today your keeper rate might be lower, but a part of that is because your willing to shoot outside your comfort zone and in less than ideal situations.

Overread wrote in post #17604297
b) In the film era you might take less shots. Because you paid for every one people were typically far less inclined to "waste" shots on chances as often as they are today when digital lets you have free shots. So today your keeper rate might be lower, but a part of that is because your willing to shoot outside your comfort zone and in less than ideal situations.

Sometimes that was true: I once went to the zoo on the weekend with 1 roll of 20exp Tri-X (B&W), a 50mm f/1.4, & a 1,000mm prime lens. Why B&W film? (Color can save your a**, but B&W is more demanding). This made me visualize & predict what might happen for each shot, but I still had to decide fast to shoot or not when/if something happened. I came back with 6 shots that I liked enough to blow up to 16" X 20".

And sometimes not:
https://photography-on-the.net …showthread.php?​p=15213689

Posts #40 & 43: https://photography-on-the.net …hread.php?t=615​331&page=3

Overread wrote in post #17604297
4) People from "the film era" say film makes you get more keepers (or other statements to that effect) however it ignores two key points:
a) Shoot and check histogram exposure is a valid approach to digital shooting and one many of us make use of; that will instantly lower your keeper rate if your taking such test shots.

b) In the film era you might take less shots. Because you paid for every one people were typically far less inclined to "waste" shots on chances as often as they are today when digital lets you have free shots. So today your keeper rate might be lower, but a part of that is because your willing to shoot outside your comfort zone and in less than ideal situations.

Personally I don't really include outright 'test' shots when I consider the number of photos I've taken that day against the number I've kept. Honestly I don't really give the question a great deal of thought in general other than to ask myself "what are aspects of these photos that I'm not using that makes me reject them, and how can I avoid taking them in the first place".

I'll often do something like grabbing a dozen frames of just a grey card to evaluate the general lighting.
- Is the light intensity stable across all the frames, or does it shift slightly every second?
- Is the colour balance stable across the frames, or does it cycle?
- Where is my white balance baseline? Can I take just one and apply it to all photos, will each photo need me to check and set it individually, or am I probably going to settle for "good enough, they're likely getting viewed on an unmanaged screen anyway"?

So I would argue about whether or not your keeper rate with film vs digital is really all that different is an apples and oranges thing. The digital sensor in your camera has simply become a tool that you can use in a lot of different ways that your film camera can't effectively be used for.

There is also the rather practical aspect of taking additional photos with digital that is the evaluation of an image, and offers you the freedom to capture a photo now without a real commitment to it, and then make the absolute final choice over it later. We do the same thing with film actually, just that it isn't nearly as cheap and easy with film as it is with digital images.

I'm not saying that thoughtless 'spray and pray' is in anyway a good thing, and I actually hold that taking photos without thought to them is something you need to avoid in order to gain any amount of skill, but rather there is nothing inherently bad about capturing lots of images and then only keeping a handful. If I think something, which is a fleeting moment that I can't recreate, is going to make an interesting image, then personally I would much rather start grabbing the images while doing everything I can to set myself up for the best photo I can produce.

If I take a photo at the time I can always decide that I was wrong afterwards, and hopefully learn something during my later evaluation of the image, but if I don't take the photo then I can't do anything about it later if I think back and start to believe that it actually would have made a great photo. And I've missed so many epic sports photos in the last few years that I wish I had of been able to capture. (But those cases were usually not seeing what was happening soon enough, or simply not being anywhere near the right location for the shot.)


Then there is the other issue I've seen for film with regards to their keeper rates, and it is something that seems especially true with mine and younger generations of the mid 30s and under crowd. Film photography seems to have this trait in many people's minds that the image captured is intrinsically better and more valuable because it was shot on film. I met a 20 something art student a few months ago who bragged to me that she was a better photographer than I was (While I had a pair of 7D cameras around my neck and blazing bursts of photos during a sports game) because every photo she made was a keeper and an absolute work of art...

And while the statement that every photo she took was a keeper and a 'work of art' may arguably be true on the technical grounds that they could all be regarded as 'art' and that she did in fact keep every last one of them... But my god she has a boring and uninspiring collection of photos.


I often come across statements from people who claim that film photography "forces you to be more demanding", and "forces you to think". Which I really have to say is hog wash given that I know photographers who have been shooting film about as long as I've been serious about learning to use my dSLRs, and they've mades dozens of prints from hundreds of images.

I'm several years into exploring my craft and have captured literally tens of thousands of photos in total. (They add up crazily fast with some gear when you're learning to shoot a sport. Plus more than a few of those images were strings of photos taken for no other reason than to capture people's reaction to the 7D's buffer... because it just keeps going.) And yet I've printed a total of I think Eight images, the few best that were the closest thing to what I was happy with... And I actually only had them printed mostly as a test experiment to see what a few printing processes would result in. So those film photographers I mentioned in the last paragraph would arguably be less demanding of their work than I've been. But I'm very demanding of what I produce, and so far I've not really shared photos because I'm happy with the results, but rather because those viewing my images have been happy with them.


So the TLDR version with a few other points:
1. Keeper ratios really don't matter if you're producing work you're happy with. Learn what makes you not like some of your photos so you can avoid taking them in the first place to cut down on the time you spend in post, but don't cry over deleting a photo you aren't happy with.

2. Worry less about how others are doing their thing, and focus more on doing your thing. You aren't them, so don't assume everything they do or think needs or should apply to you.

3. Learn from others, but see point 2

4. Odds are that as you get better you'll also become more demanding of your own work and settle for even fewer of your photos. But see point 1 again.

5. Experiment and do what makes you happy. I'm very technically minded and would probably enjoy the act of just using a large format field camera and printing photos from it more than I'll ever enjoy the final image out of it.

6. If you ever get to the point where you feel you can't possibly do anything better, then odds are you're in some kind of a slump and need to step back and rethink things.

'It depends'...

in the old days of film, you would read articles stating, "If you get 2-3 three 'keepers' out of a roll, I consider my outing a success." But that was seeking one of those 'Ansel Adams emulation photos' which are artististically appealing, technically correct, and compositionally well done.
It is 'something different' to shoot prom portraits, you expect EVERY shot to be technically correct and compositionally well done -- even if they are not artistically appealing and have merit primarily in documenting the prom couple!

Today, with the high FPS of the dSLR, and shooters who -- solely out of habit and HOPE for one good shot -- take 3-5 shots for every photo (and the shots are only tenths of a second apart), that merely increase the number of rejects or virtual duplicates of one shot! While standing in line waiting to get into the catacombs of Paris in the past year, a 20-something young woman was with her 5-6 friends, and EVERY shot was a 3-5 shot group taken at the FPS rate of the camera (I could understand if she had a standard 3-shot exposure bracket grouping)!

Wilt wrote in post #17604461
While standing in line waiting to get into the catacombs of Paris in the past year, a 20-something young woman was with her 5-6 friends, and EVERY shot was a 3-5 shot group taken at the FPS rate of the camera (I could understand if she had a standard 3-shot exposure bracket grouping)!

Wouldn't a group shot be one opportunity to use burst, to combat blinkers? Depending on the burst speed I suppose... A fast camera these days might give you a nice animation of a single blink.

To answer the OP (and this probably sounds more flippant than I mean it to, but) it would vary a lot with my mood when asked. Some days I feel like I've yet to make one picture worth keeping. Other days I'd say I would be happy to get 1-5 images I could stand to see again from any one shoot, no matter how many frames were shot, whether it was 10 or 1000.

In terms of the ratio that I don't delete, I'm not sure but I tend to keep most (so I guess you could describe me as a keeper! :P), aside from the clearest unintentional problems (focus failures, forgetting to change exposure, etc.) Keepers only in the literal sense, and kept for a variety of reasons including pure documentary reference or speculative potential for compositing.

If I check the ratio of pictures I've rated with 1/5 stars or above out of the total catalogued, for recent years it seems to be around 1/15. But that's probably not a useful metric either since I'm inconsistent with rating reasons, depending on what or who a particular shoot is for.

One thing I have noticed is if I look at my shots the same day I shoot them, I am usually a little underwhelmed, not always, but usually though. After a day or two I seem to look at them with a little different mindset and perspective. Then after I cull through them and photo edit certain ones I come back a few days later and they seem to more acceptable.

I don't mean to interrupt this thread but as I progressed though this thread I couldn't help think about the days when we only had film....so different now. Can anybody relate to that time period and what you had to go? As the saying goes...you don't know what rich is unless you have been poor.

drifter106 wrote in post #17605401
I don't mean to interrupt this thread but as I progressed though this thread I couldn't help think about the days when we only had film....so different now. Can anybody relate to that time period and what you had to go? As the saying goes...you don't know what rich is unless you have been poor.

I quit taking pictures in the film days because I had boxes of undeveloped film.