Ok, spill the beans...

ApexSpeed · #1 08-05-2006

Ok Jimmy, I have been wondering this for a while, and after spending some time Saturday shooting some of the local off road track, I am wondering what your ratio is of shots taken to "keepers."

For every 30 shots of a race event you have in the gallery, how many shots did you take to get there?

How aggressively do you crop your work after it has been shot?

My weak 18-70 lens isn't cutting it for track action shots, either. I can't get close enough to keep me out of harm's way. Anything that I get that is good, is too far away to have any impact.

Here's a few that I snapped this weekend:

jimmy · #2 08-05-2006

Hi mate,
The 18-70 is a bit limited, you do need to get close to get close up shots like.

The above shot is with the kit 18-70 lens, but I was at in the middle of the track quite close to the car.

Ratio of keepers are I guess anywhere from 50-90% depending on conditions really. Out doors in good light 90% or so are gonna be bang on. I probably get a slightly lower ratio out of my fancy Canon because of the way I use it.

At the weekend I got about 4-500 photos ?!? give or take. Because it was indoors the Canon was producing about 50-60% Keepers, the Nikon about 70% (all pure guesswork), Needless to say I get a lot of decent photos that I don't put up on the site, theres just too many.

Cropping, I crop on most of my photos yep. A small percentage I dont, but theres simply no way of framing a high speed car properly. So I crop it for best effect, sometimes just a little to better focus on the subject. I might do a lil Add-On to my photo tips thingybob just to show how I post process the images. I do it all very quickly and dont spend more than a few seconds per image so theres not much I do to them.

Jimmy

Quote:

Originally Posted by ApexSpeed

Ok Jimmy, I have been wondering this for a while, and after spending some time Saturday shooting some of the local off road track, I am wondering what your ratio is of shots taken to "keepers."

For every 30 shots of a race event you have in the gallery, how many shots did you take to get there?

How aggressively do you crop your work after it has been shot?

My weak 18-70 lens isn't cutting it for track action shots, either. I can't get close enough to keep me out of harm's way. Anything that I get that is good, is too far away to have any impact.

Here's a few that I snapped this weekend:

ApexSpeed · #3 09-05-2006

Thanks for the comments, Jimmy. I shot about 90 pics last weekend, and had cropped down about 60 usable images. Not too bad. I'm going to need to do something about my current lens range, though...

I also use some neat Photoshop tricks when doing large numbers of files the same way, too. You can use batching and actions to "play & record" one set of steps and automate those steps for other files. Using the little watermarks, outlines and other typical elements is easily repeated for hundreds of images.

doug