Usable shots vs Used shots

A comment on a thread today about usable shots made me want to ask the following:

If you get 200+ usable shots during a game, how many of them really see the light of day or any other eyeballs beside yours?

At BB games I get about 150 pics in focus and exposed satisfactorily, but usually deem 30 to 40 worthy of PP and placement on my website.

Last week a well-established photog was shooting the same game as me and has about 400 photos on his web site. The pics are usually a sequence of 3-4 of the same 0.8 seconds of action. As a parent looking at the pics, I was miffed that I had to go through 400 shots to find any pics of my kid. Also 360 of the shots were worthless IMHO.

So do you try to get 200 usable shots? Or do you try to get shots that are used? Where do YOU draw the line? Is there a line? Thanks!

I've found that parents don't want to wade through 100 or more game or team shots as the only ones they are interested in are of their own children, and they want to be able to find them as quickly as possible and with the least amount of hassle. Most seem to be happy with two or three good images and will often buy copies of each if there are only a few. Personally, I see no purpose to uploading hundreds of images per game, especially if they are unprocessed and of questionable quality. A handful of decent, quality shots goes a lot farther.

Yep. I know who my audience is, so I try to have at least one photo of every player. That means I'll PP and put up some photos that don't have a ball or that are slightly OOF or have other defects if it is the only one with that person that I have.

Yeah i've seen sites that do that too. i get bored and just leave. where on the other hand i won't put up more than 50 for a game. make it easy for them.

If I had a sequence of something, I'd pick one, maybe two depending on the shot. Most likely one just to have one of each player though because they're all doing the same thing, apart from the reactions.

For sports, I try to post less than 100. Football may mean more. For indoor sports I usually post under 75. For a School play the numbers are higher.

I shoot for around 75-100/game, anymore and I am duplicating images. For me, I rarely post marginal stuff as I'd much rather have a parent "complaining" that I didn't get their kid (at which point I'll be sure to next game) than to have one complaining about IQ. I try to diffeerentiate myself on quality of the product so to post anything marginal undermines that. The downside is that I may miss a sale here or there but I'd rather miss the $5 4x6 sale than hurt my rep. One thing I don't do that I should is keyword and tag images. If a parent knows they can simply search on their kids name and/or number and find all images of them, I think I'd see sales do better. To-do list....

It's not easy question, because answer depends on quite few things. If you are shooting some game and want to sell this shoots to players or parents, then I would say you put pretty much everything you get up to display. I luckily never shoot this things, so I might be wrong, but my logic says I would do it this way.
If one the other side, you are shooting for agency (like I do), then I normally send between 10 and 20 photos from game or race. For me this is not really true, because we work with few other agencies, and last weekend on skiing World cup I had too much time, so I went to count how many photos all together I sent... All together it went out about 150 photos to 6 different places. So if you divide this by 6, you still get those 20 photos.
And then there's last option... shooting for newspaper. In that case, you send out 1 to max 5 photos... everything else goes to delete or to archive which most of time noone see it.

This is from a real rookie here: I take about 200 shots/game. 50-80 are deleted on the spot. Of the 120-150 make it to the computer, another 50 or so are deleted for focus issues. Another 20 or so for content.

Leaves me with about 75 to work with. Several more usually find the recycle bin leaving anywhere from 50-70 to post on the boys basketball website. Truth be told, a small handful of those would be print-worthy!

OTOH, a mom I know shoots football. She's the type who puts 250 images on a website each week ... most of which are mega-crap and should have been canned during first screening. Come to think of it, she may just upload her camera to the website and not even bother to look at the images first. Possibility.

dave

I see the same thing on Max Preps some guys will have 300 photos from a game. You look through them at there will be a sequence of 10 shots basically the same and a lot of shots with out a ball in the scene.

When I upload I put up the best and save the ones that are marginal or pretty much duplicates. If a parent orders some I'll look through my photos to see if I have any others of there kid and email them if I do.

HE'S LAZY

It would be very rare for a parent to buy multiple images of the same sequence.
I'll bet his hosting site loves him.

Dave

its crazy, I see that too. One photographer here does the same, she just fires away and puts them all up for sale on her website straight from the camera, even the really obvious bad ones. 300 or so per game easy.

Personally I usually end up with about 300 shots per game, I narrow those down to the decent action/focus etc to about 50 -100 shots, then I pick the top 20 or 25 per game. I think thats more than enough.

I use to post 40-50 shots per game of various sporting events after shooting 150 or so. Since one of the goal of my business to provide a place for high school athletes to view game pictures as well as make them affordable to all players and parents. I have started to take 300-400 a game this year and post 150 or more to my site mtmediaplus.com. I only hope to get 10-15, what I concider great shots, but you never know what kind of pictures parents would like to purchase.The players and parents response to what I have started here has been rewarding. To reach the players at the three schools I shoot at I exchange pictures for advertising of my business in their yearbook. I have a full-time job and started the sports thing as a hobby. It has just taken off on me and gets me out of in front of the TV and a chance to see some good high school sports. As the new years sport season approaches the files are removed to make way for the current season. Some of the extra pictures can be used to make team or player highlight videos. If you have the site space, I say use it and post more your paying for it already.

I talked to parents this past weekend. They complained about "spray and pray" photography. They didn't want to click through 500 photographs of garbage to see their kid. They didn't want to see 8 photos of the same 2 seconds of action. They wanted someone else to pick the best of the 8 photos and let them see only the one best photo in the sequence.

I'm not saying they wanted to see only great photos. They just didn't want to see redundant photos.

Thanks for all the comments! I would've expect even more opinions on this thread though.