On average what would you say is your success rate when you go out to shoot? And what’s your experience level?
For myself who has a passion for photography but zero formal training and only purchased my first real camera less than a year ago, I’d say 1% of the pictures that I take are “good” or at least to the point to where I’d share them.
I know a lot comes from just going out and taking pictures but I feel like the gaps between when I go out and take pictures and actually sit at the computer and look at them is so spread out that I can never remember what I did or was thinking last time I was out shooting
As a photojournalist and also corporate professional, this number varies greatly.
Shooting photojournalism you can shoot from 20-100 shots in an assignment, maybe 300 if you’re rapid firing speeches or events (not including sports) and 1-3 go with the article. But now everyone wants a dozen choices and a photo gallery, so you have to up your game and produce more. I turned in three recently and got begged for my rejects and they ended up publishing six in a magazine out like 20 fairly bad choices.
I went to Iceland and shot 3,000 photos in a week, got home and probably liked 300, but 12 went on the wall.
But then I went to Arches National Park yesterday, shot 158 pictures (50 were for a panoramic HDR to be fair) and I’ve just now produced 4 total pictures for showing off and I’m pretty sure I actually like 2 of them.
I shot an all-day event last month and had two cameras, so I shot like 6,000 because I was chasing a lot of kids around the park, getting vendors interacting, etc. and the client wanted 150 finals, including all the musicians, award winners and demonstrations, so I had to massively increase the number of shots I took to get 150 good shots.
And then shooting portraits I can do a dozen for a headshot and produce 3-5 for the client or I can shoot 200 for a session with lots of movement and outfit changes and get 25 I like but only 8 that they like.
It’s a crazy numbers game for sure. I don’t know if someone can derive a percentage out of my stats but this is kind of how it goes. But at least I can generally go in to an assignment with these intentions in mind and shoot with the goal of getting those outputs for them or myself.