4,860.
This past weekend, I had the honor of shooting the APA South Jersey World Qualifier Tournament at Harrah’s in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And 4,860 is the number of images I captured from Thursday afternoon until 1 am Monday morning.
Monday, I performed my first edit. After any shoot, my first and immediate activity is to download and backup the images. Before I save what is a maddening amount of data to my hard drive, external drive, and cloud drive, I delete a fair amount of images. I remove images with distracting motion blur or poor composition. I eliminate images where a random arm or, in this case, pool cue, seems to be sticking out of a subject’s head. And I always sigh as I delete a fair portion of my work.
Sigh.
But, honestly, all pro photographers suffer this process. Sports photographer Scott Kelby, for example, admitted taking 1,873 shots at a Bucs / Eagles game. And how many did he ultimately use? 46.
46.
He admits to a 5% keeper rate.
Why so few?
Well…there’s always the shots taken by accident. Raising the camera and tapping the shutter. Whoops.
Or…the focus is off. Maybe I intend to focus on the player to the right, but the player moves and the focus lands on some random spot in the frame. This is why I take 2-5 shots while moving my focus point.
Uninteresting. Boring. Not compelling.
I eliminated a fair amount of shots where hair or a baseball hat blocked the player’s eyes. If you can’t see that intensity, that focus, why publish the image? I won’t.
Maybe the scene is messy – too many things going on in the frame so it has no compositional focus.
Catching a great moment only to have an unknowing person – a ref, another player, an onlooker – block your line of sight.
Grabbing a series of images in the hope to catch that one great gesture or expression. So…you take 20 and get maybe 1 good one.
I’ve discovered the typical pro captures 500 or so photos per game. Some take as many as 1900 per game. It really depends on the sport and the play action. Since I took photos for 9 rounds of pool…I’m about average.
Now to the second edit.
