Shooting Ratio

Something I read recently suggested that Sebastian Salgado uses about

1 out of every 150 frames for a rough cut of a photoessay, and an

essay I am reading on Frank's Americans suggested a similar or even

lower ratio for the images in that book. FWIW, my rough cut for 35mm

B+W street photography usually represents about 1% of the frames I

shoot (obviously this is because I am less rigorous than Frank and

Salgado, not because I am better), of which I eventually lose another

third or so. For static architectural work on medium or large format,

it's more like 1 in 10 to 1 in 20.

 

What's your normal shooting ratio - out of interest - and how does it

vary with different equipment / subject matter / approach?

So far, with hummingbirds, about 1 per 1000. There's no way to tell what position their wings will be in when the flash fires, and the bird can easily vanish from the frame in the lag time between the decision to shoot and the shot.

Well, I'm no professional and most of my images are seen only by family and friends so I'm not too picky when it comes to selecting images for enlarging. When I was doing street photography with a 35mm camera I would usually really like one or two shots out of 36. Now that I shoot medium format and get 10 shots per roll (which just means I change film more often, I usually shoot 3-5 rolls depending on any number of things) I usually like three or four images per roll. Why the increase? Well for one thing using medium format makes me slow down and really consider what they I'm shooting. Plus the quality of medium format negatives is just way beyond what I was able to achieve with 35mm.

Regards,

Marc

The major variable for me seems to be myself. Some days I'm

on, and nearly every shot will be a keeper. Some days I'm off,

and nearly every shot is a throw away. And I can almost always

tell when I'm getting it, before even seeing the negs.

<p>For street photography I post about 5-10% to <a href=http://www.johnsidlo.com/imagesNew.html>my web site</a>, but that is more like a blog than anything. I think only about 10% of that is what I'm really proud of. So 1% sounds like a good estimate.</p>

For me the longer I shoot and the better I get, the worse my percentages are. Its really tough for an image to break into my existing portfolio. I still shoot the same amount, but the number of hits keep getting smaller.

while i think my photographic skills have improved over time, my editing skills have not. with each new contact sheet or set of prints, i continue to be amazed at my percieved lack of talent.

however, my ex-wife was a great editor and would look over my stuff and select the shots for me to print. my 'ratio' was so much better with her around.

If Salgado selects one out of 150, why must we assume he's got 149 failures?

 

What he has are a limited number of pages and a lot of negatives. Among the 149 cuts would be some failures, many shots too similar to another, some that don't fit the essay, some that are tangential to the narrative, etc.

It's quite popular here to have a box at the gate with the words 'US Mail' embossed on it. Absurd, clearly.

Oops, sorry, wrong forum!

Keep in mind the purpose of the photographs. If you are on an assignment, then your pictures have to conform to a idea that belongs to someone else. However, if you shoot for pleasure, a shot you took last year, last week or even 10 years ago may affect you differently now. Sometimes an image will just have to grow on you before you can fully appreciate it.

Cheers,

Marc

One or two keepers per roll on good days.

Marc Said: "Now that I shoot medium format ... I usually like three or four images per roll. Why the increase? Well for one thing using medium format makes me slow down and really consider what they I'm shooting."

 

I totally agree, Marc. I think completely differently with the medium format camera.

 

I have times when I feel like I am succeeding and times I feel like an utter failure, but, oddly, when I get to the darkroom and look at the negs, I can't remember which roll was supposed to be the success and which the failure and I can't tell them apart just by looking. That feeling (success vs failure) seems to be more a reflection of my dark or sunny disposition at the time and doesn't seem to translate directly into the frames.

 

I also don't often recognized the really good frames until a few weeks or months pass. If I try to go too fast, I just print the ones where the memories excite me, often missing the ones where the actual content eventually excites me. I always print the portraits of women first because ... well... they are women. After I get that nonsense cleared out of my veins I can go back and look for other things. At that stage, I try to look at the negs as I might look at the world itself, with fresh eyes, searching for something.

 

I find that if I don't really LOOK when I evaluate the negatives, I can miss a lot. Often, when I get a noticably high "failure rate" it really means I wasn't fully present and focused when I was exploring the negs.

i have a 300% hit ratio

I agree with much of the above, esp. the notion that one's criteria for editing and selection can change, depending on intended use, and on experience. Interestingly, I found that my strike rate on 35mm rose slightly (noticeably, but not radicaly) when I shifted from photographing strangers to photographing people I knew. Probably because I had slightly longer to take the shot before I was likely to get a fist in the face, and my hands shook less at lower shutter speeds (less adrenalin). When I started on LF, I was initially aiming for about 20% keepers (it's just too expensive and time-consuming to experiment wildly), but some teething difficulties meant numerous early technical failures.

My kept ratio goes up and I have a lot more keepers in the initial stages of using a new camera system

 

ie, Nikon F ---> Leica LTM ---> Leica M ---> TLR ---> Canon D30 ---> Hasselblad 203 ---> Pentax 645 ---> Nikon SP --->D70

 

There's a similar, though smaller effect when I use a new lens.

 

Some how I feel more inspired.

 

Maybe I'm just a gearhead.

For the type of shooting that interests this forum, I get about one good shot per 36-exposure roll.

 

That's a rough ratio for what I call a "good" shot. For what I would call "exhibition quality" I get about one per 10 rolls. However, I always have prints in my exhibitions, lots of them it seems, that are less than "exhibition quality." That's because, as a documentary photographer, I select shots that form a group and tell the story. The content of a photo is often much more important than artistic merits, and that is the "curse" of documentary photography. But if I can include a couple "exhibition quality" prints in a group, the others seem better!

 

In the course of a project, I might shoot 10 rolls of a situation, knowing I will only use one shot in the exhibition (for example a dance performance). Or I might only have time for 3 quick frames of a situation, knowing that one of those frames will be in the exhibition, regardless (for example a mother scolding a child, or a dinosaur bone being lifted from the soil).

 

I agree with Ward about looking at the images later. Time, and lots of it, helps me to find the good stuff I missed when I first looked through a batch. And I am not my best editor, and have learned to use a team approach for final selection. Early in my career I was editing slides for submitting to a prestigious, international magazine for publication. When I as done editing, my wife looked through all the slides and rescued one that I had rejected on the first pass. It became one of three the editors selected for publication! And does she let me forget that? Noooooo.

I don't think about shooting success in those terms. Just being out half a day wandering

around shooting people does it for me. It usually works out in the end...

<i><p>Brad Evans , may 29, 2004; 11:43 a.m.<br>

I don't think about shooting success in those terms. Just being out half a day wandering around shooting people does it for me. It usually works out in the end...</p></i><br>

I often feel like this, too. Usualy when its time to fill out those bl*y income tax forms ...