chez wrote:
ruthenium wrote
gdanmitchell wrote
ruthenium wrote
I have a question that is not intended as critical: how many keepers do you retain after culling "thousands of images spanning many cards" after a single two-month trip?
I believe you are not a wildlife photographer (who can shoot thousands of images in a single day); thus, the number you mentioned is interesting from my perspective. For example, I have recently returned from a seven-week trip to Japan, that was split between Okinawa and Shikoku. From this trip, I brought about a thousand of GFX100S II raw files on two cards. I am culling these now, with the goal of selecting 200-300 photos to keep (some for artistic reasons, that I may want to share, and some for personal sentimental reasons).
I am interested in the experience of others, who like you go on extended trips. How images do you keep after culling?
Regarding the batteries, like Dan, I seem to never need more than one a day. Although I travel with a spare, it isn't used. I think there is going to be a lot of variation among photographers here. It depends on what you photograph and how you photograph and more.
For example, if a lot of what you are photographing is people, particularly not in formal portrait settings, you are often reacting quickly to what is happening… or even to what you hope may happen. A lot of those shots are going to be “misses,” and among the good ones you’ll probably end up dismissing more than you keep. (I’m thinking right now of some particular Paris street scenes I staked out, watching for the right combination of “urban landscape” and passing people — I might have made 20 or more exposures to get the one that I’ll share.
By its nature — for the great majority of photographers — there’s a strong reactive aspect to photography. Things happen, and you try to photograph them. You see a subject, and you may try multiple ways of working with it.
About a month ago I came back from a six-week trip to Ireland, Scotland, and England with about 1400 frames. (Not counting additional images on an iPhone.) I’m still working my way through them. The great majority are not worthy of sharing publicly, and I’ll never work them up. A smaller percentage are interesting enough to spend some time working with them, but not all of those make the cut. An even smaller number are worth taking through the full post-processing workflow to completion. I’ll guess that number might be 30-40. These are photographs that I think are worth sharing, but not necessarily my best work. In the end, a handful might make that cut.
As Ansel is reputed to have said: “I think a dozen good images in a year is a pretty good haul.” (paraphrased.) I understand "reacting quickly to what is happening… . A lot of those shots are going to be “misses"
This happens to me. I have a habit of reviewing the images taken during a day, at the end of the day, and would try to remove the obvious (apparent from viewing even on the camera screen) misses. A serious culling happens later.
To me, finally keeping 200 or so (but no more than 300) photos after a trip is a reasonable number, and often I feel that keeping fewer images is better than keeping more (“...a dozen good images in a year is a pretty good haul" - is my thinking as well). For final culling, I call my wife. The photos that she wouldn't find interesting, I usually delete without much further thinking.
It is from this point of view, that I was surprised by the "thousands of images spanning many cards" mentioned earlier in this thread. To me, a reasonable ratio of total images on cards to the final keepers is somewhere around 3:1; hence the total number I would try to keep within a thousand, not thousands. For a two-month trip, this means about 17 images per day (on average) - no surprise one battery is enough for a day of shooting, in my use. What I shoot is a mix of street/candid and handheld landscape photography. I can imagine that other uses can work differently, and I don't mean that my way of shooting is "better" than what others do. Why limit the number of images taken to the number of keepers you want in the end? Why not shoot what interests you and just see what results when you get home? I find trying to capture moments in time that depict what’s happening around me to be a very challenging yet relaxing activity and never count the number of times I pressed the shutter.
This is all personal, and I am not arguing. My reasons for limiting the number of images are relatively simple.
First, I like the experience of observing a scene as much as photographing it. I very rarely shoot something important that requires fast shooting. Thus, my numbers are limited naturally by me stopping to observe a scene and sometimes deciding against pushing the shutter, rather than taking pictures and thinking later.
Second, is the very real problem of the time that culling and post-processing take (especially when considering that my raw files are 102MP and are around 120-130MB on average). I have the latest and very powerful M3 Ultra Mac Studio with 96GB RAM and 2TB storage, but even then the amount of storage and processing for thousands such raw files may become unreasonable at some point.