As my gear has gotten better and as I've learned the value of slowing down, my keeper rate has gone way up. Many times I'd guess it to be ~75% shooting portraits in the field.
And my need to crop to a better composition has significantly diminished. I have to try and remind myself to shoot a touch wider than the shot I see in my mind to leave room for cropping different print sizes.
on a portrait session of 300 shots, i usually send 100-140 usable shots to have client choose between 10 to 30 shots. i always choose my top 15 shots for myself, no matter what the client decide to pick.
overall, id say i have a 30-40% keeper. all depends on the subject, how easy going they are with the camera.
For models and portfolio, i shoot whatever photos i need. its not over until we are happy.
One thing I'd still like to know is how some of you guys/gals get such a high 'in focus/sharp' rate like Will mentioned earlier. I know he's got 45 years behind a camera and it's no surprise he's very good at what he does, but after all I've heard or read over the past couple years I still struggle.
Breathing, hand placement, steady posture, rolling the finger over the shutter button, etc. why do I continue to miss focus, get less than sharp images, end up with noisy images in decent light?
Missing a moment or something in the background, not seeing the stray hairs, and all that stuff has to come with experience and practice, but the act of pressing the shutter shouldn't be so dang hard, but it is for me.
If I didn't mention it before, my keeper/success rate IMO is zero. 100-200 shots and I'll end up not considering any of them keepers, but will go back through and look for what's sharp or 'maybe' decent and go from there. It's pretty disheartening.
no_surrender wrote:
For portraits, single shot. Street photography, which I VERY recently started trying, AI servo.
I use AF-C, which is Nikon's equivelant of Canon's AI Servo, for all portraiture now. I also disable autofocus from the shutter button and use the rear AF-ON button for focusing. I have found that my keeper rate of in focus shots has probably gone from 30% to 80 - 90% as a result as the camera compensates for any subject movement or camera position changes.
So you focus with the rear AF button, but still press the shutter to take the picture? I may have to look into that. Someone mentioned that to me once, but I didn't see the benefit.
Any idea why it's more effective than using the shutter button to focus? I learned the hard way some time ago not to focus and recompose...if I have to I compose and just use manual focus.
First, I don't care about "keeper rate", and I think people have the tendency to over-emphasize it. Getting 5 good photos from taking 50 all day, versus getting 5 good photos from taking 250 all day, it's pretty much the same to me. It really depends on how much other work we have to do to get those 5 good photos, and how good those 5 are. I'm very liberal with the shutter, there's no reason to hold back in the digital age.
It's funny but we'll talk it over before and during the shoot, "These are the shots I want" or "can we try something like this." And we do, but that's very rarely the way things turn out. What we end up with is often "not quite what we wanted, or expected, but a good photo nonetheless." Not getting what you expected doesn't have to be a bad thing, as long as you are pleased with the end result.
Also I said five above, because the big club I'm in, five is the maximum number of shots you get to post for that event. Quality over quantity. Honestly when I shoot with someone else, we'd rather get a couple of really awesome shots than 20+ 'good' ones.
I think the main thing for me is, I always try to keep the interests of the people I'm working with in mind. I'm not self-critical, I try not to think in terms of myself at all but rather in the mindset of the people I'm working with. I mean, when I try to think from a photographic standpoint, working from or evaluating with the mindset of a photographer, I'll often find the photos he/she likes are so far removed from that. For this reason, I really don't post much of my work to photographic sites, I use the forums more for discussion than critique, as I can get that mostly from the people I work with or others like them.
