How many keepers do you actually keep?

Some time ago I switched from (low) burst to single shot as the pictures kept piling up on the computer drives while sorting it all out drove me nuts. But even now, using single shot only, even for bif's, I feel like ending up with way too many images as most are keepers. Its on me ofcourse, taking too many shots and while its nice to end up with mostly keepers I find myself having to prune many of the lesser keepers to keep it all somewhat manageable.

Considering todays equipment its probably everyones problem now so how do you folks manage all yours shots and keepers? I mean, Sony's 24mp RAW's are actually 24MB on average, stuff piles up quickly...

100% of keepers

I’ve had a DSLR since 2003 and I’ve never shot more than 24 or 36 shots in a day, no kidding.
Burst… LMAO …yeah, I once ripped my pants climbing over a barbed wire fence on the side of a mountain.

Don’t you know… slow photography is the new Rock 'n' Roll.

Nick Carver shoots up a Liquor Store.

22:51 www.youtube.com/embed/G_wiHZZND6I

I don't worry about it. I shoot at an effective 7-10 fps (focus+stabilization for each image), download the images onto a hard drive and quickly scan those for any that interest me. I may shoot 2000 images in an afternoon and only process 3-4 images. For BIFs a significant percentage will have the wings in a poor position. For some like hummingbirds, only a very small percentage will have the wings fully extended.

I will eventually return to the folders when it is too cold with too much snow outside and quickly delete the ones on no further interest, keeping any that I may want to process in the future.

Hard drives are relatively inexpensive (I have an external HD enclosure with 4 HD plus the ones in my desktop) so the images I don't delete are available should I want to use any of them in the future.

I would never use single images for an subject of interest, even for stationary targets, since all cameras/lenses have focus variability and some images are simply better than others.

Talk about your efficiency :) I'm much too trigger happy to be that zen but you have my admiration!

That is similar to my workflow, until now the most efficient I could come up with, while the date and location tags make for an efficient index.

For me the difference between bursts and single shots are about 5000 vs 300 images. Trigger happy as I am I havent got much choice in the matter as I take a relatively long time to evaluate final keepers. Guess I'm really thorough but I lack in the speed and efficiency department.

You know what I shoot, but I shoot mainly at 8-10 FPS and I would never come home with more than 150 shots, very short bursts of around 3-4 shots. My shots are 60mb compressed and 120mb uncompressed. Storage is fairly cheap these days, so that's not really a major issue.

Keepers all depends on what I consider the best, the rest go in the bin even though a lot of them might be sharp. A hard one to answer really, but maybe a lot less than some would expect I keep.

All the best.

Danny.

Thats a relatively low number considering, not what I expected no, can imagine for you to be quite selective during the shooting allready. Lots of mb's by the way, much room for cropping but seems like a pain logistically, to me anyway.

I do mostly bird and wildlife photography. If I have a good outing with close approaches by multiple animals, I can come home with 600+ photos.

When reviewing the photos in Lightroom Classic (LrC), my goal is to find the 1 out of 100 that are my absolute favorites. Suppose for example that I made 200 photos during fly-bys of hawks. Not every fly-by is the same. If there's one during which the bird came so close that I had difficulty keeping the bird within the frame, I'll focus attention on thay set of photos.

Within each set from an encounter, I look for four things. First and foremost, I'm looking at the light on the bird. If the bird isn't well-lit, it's not worth my time to process the image and I move on.

I'm also looking initially at composition to confirm the subject is entirely within the frame. There are rare exceptions I'll make during particularly close encounters when the bird is well placed with good lead room but the wings are outstretched enough that one or both leave the frame. However, most birds - even when making a close passage - aren't that near. Keeping them in the frame usually isn't the problem.

Among the photos of a well-lit, nicely-composed subject, I'll zoom to a 100% view and check for tack focus on the eye and face, if focus is slightly off, the photo doesn't get marked for processing. If it passes muster for focus, the photo gets a 5-star rating.

The fourth and final criteria includes the "decisive moment" factors. Of the ten photos that have earned the 5-star rating, is there one in which the body and wing position is most to my liking? One in which the background is more pleasing? One in which there's a catch light in the bird's eye? One in which the bird is making eye contact with me through the lens?

The few photos that share those qualities get flagged as picks.

I've set up LrC to automatically add photos with 5-star ratings to a smart collection called, "Ready for Post". When I go into that collection, I'll often start by filtering to display only those photos I've flagged as picks. Amongst those, I'll mentally filter based on my tastes and prerogatives for the one or two photos out of 5 from that one encounter that are my favorites.

Those are the photos that get processed. In this way and through this approach, I can get through a 600-800 image outing in a single day and end up with 8-12 photos that get processed and added either to my portfolio or a favorites collection.

The other photos are still in the folder for that morning's or afternoon's outing. But it's the small number that stand out that get the full treatment. Depending on the keywords I've assigned, the star rating, color label, and flag status, LrC will automatically sort the processed photos into various smart collections, from those photos that were good enough to process to those that stand out as my best-of-the-best.

It's a process that serves me and my needs. It's helped me to keep a 160K image catalog manageable. It's an aporoach that can be adapted to any genre of photography. Set the criteria needed for an image to pass your muster and progress through your evaluation process until it ends up in a collection of favorites worthy of your time in LrC or your image processing & editing app of choice.

Good luck to you.

Lightroom RAW backups its ....... 848 GB which is not bad considering how long I've been at it. If I had kept everything, well then there would be issues :-)

Danny.

Seems a well structured workflow, I like the efficiency of it, thanks.

Ray

Thats a nightmarish amount of captures worth allready :-) And to say that is just a small percentage of the entire thing...

I agree, your process seems quite efficient. Its interesting that you choose light first My first pass is out of focus and shots where I just missed the moment I was looking for. Then I look at composition.

If I filtered by light, I don't think I would have much to edit. 😊

I shoot two subjects at high fps rates, BIF and soccer. I like both of them because they are really challenging. I have also, on major trips, shot dolphins which are more challenging still, but my best dolphin photography has been 5,000 or more miles from where I live, so my opportunities have been far too few. 😁

I shoot BIF for fun and keep a very small proportion, probably less than 1%. At my nearest location, a wetlands area (Slimbridge), I normally delete the complete shoot. I just go there to keep my hand in. It isn't somewhere to get competition quality BIF shots.

I shoot soccer matches for a local club. Nowadays I shoot at 25 fps and take about 1,000 shots a match in 5-30 shot bursts. I am mainly looking for action shots, particularly goals. Soccer action is so fast that you have to try to predict where the ball is going to be and start shooting before it arrives. That means that maybe 50% of bursts don't show anything and get deleted right away. Out of focus shots are probably another 25% and I delete them immediately as well. That leaves about 250 shots per game that are of interest. I select about 70-80 shots and upload them for the club. I don't necessarily give them my best shots - they don't want shots of opponents goals or that are embarrassing for the players, even if I like them. If I have a lot of very similar shots in a burst, I just quickly choose one - I don't spend a lot of time worrying about which is the best. If it is a goal, I normally select 6-8 shots to try to give a good indication of exactly how the goal was scored. At the moment, about a year after the match I delete everything but the originals of the uploaded images. That means that I delete some good shots, e.g. opponents' goals, but I haven't found a workflow to keep them as well.

1 of 100. Since I don't really go back to old raws I wonder if I just should use my hds for something else. This year I started deleting most raws after pp ;-)

I shoot birds at 40 FPS. The frame count climbs to ridiculous numbers yet with all photography, what matters is the keepers. Effective culling is the name of the game. I only process a small percentage of the images I take and from this smaller set about 50% are worthy of use.

Morris

It's kind of a 1A, 1B, 1C thing for me. Depending on my most recent shoot, it may be the light, the focus accuracy, or composition that is foremost in my mind when responding to a query like this :)

I catagorize by creating subject folders and placing photos in them. In each folder I do a quick scan with Windows Photos to see if anything really looks great. I keep track of those by placing them in a Keepers subfolder. This usually starts off with good lighting on the bird. Another criteria I use for birding is size in the frame. Unless it is a new bird that I wish to keep for record-keeping purposes, I know that I have better close-up shots from other sessions so I do not keep shots just for the sake of keeping them.
A lot of shots will appear to be repeats. I start a scan that picks the first good one in the series (light and focus) and use that as a reference. Any previous and subsequent ones are then deleted. I have learned that it is not worth the time trying to get the best shot in a series of similar shots once a good one has been tagged as the reference.
Get rid of the butt shots, no eyes showing, and the like. Branches and grasses in the way? Get rid of it!
From the Keepers I will then select different compositions, bird facing left, right, perched, flying, taking off, landing, eating, etc.

The more interesting shots will be behavioral, birds eating, landing, taking off, courting, etc. Those are the ones to keep for further selection based on what you have. Some series of shots may depict an action sequence that is worthy of processing each photo. I do not spend to much time picking a static shot, a couple or so and that's it.
On another day I will then review the Keepers and determine what I would like to print for calenders, books and wall art. It is those that I then do my editing work on.
I may not end up publishing them but that is the criteria I use to choose where to focus my time on.
In the end I will keep only about 5% of the shots.

I have also gotten into the habit of picking an older photo session and reviewing it for further culling. Some days are completely deleted if I have taken shots on later day that are better and make the previous ones no longer worthy of storage. This is difficult to do at first, but you get over it.