Keep in mind the "keep" rate in sports photography is going to be significantly lower then in studio work. I would say a lot of my motorsports pictures get throw away just because they are either blurry or not sharp enough.

 

Re-reading this thread I was just thinking about that. When you are talking about a subject such as Olympic athletes it is more difficult to get keepers than with motorsports even. For example in volleyball the subject may be running towards or away, turn towards or away for a set, may make an unattractive face, may position themselves where the background becomes distracting; with a subject like this they may shoot every serve, set and spike only to keep maybe 20 of the hundreds of photos.

In this sense I would say digital is a great thing for photographers, since there isn't nearly as much time to frame the shot the way you like. This also lets you get away from having to stick with more of the "safety" type shots.

 

zzziippyyy, thanks for the info will keep that in mind

 

Your very welcome!

 

I find that my ratio of keepers to garbage varies greatly depending on the camera I'm using, or in the case of the D300, depending on the way I'm using the camera.

With large format sheet film cameras almost every setup produces a great image, but I bracket, so the ratio is pretty much fixed at 3:1, unless I do something stupid and waste a sheet of film along the way.

With medium format roll film cameras that use a focusing screen, I generally get 3 to 6 keepers out of every 12 shot roll.

With 35mm roll film I'm doing well if I get three good shots on a 36 exposure roll, and that drops if I'm running a power winder or motor drive. I do better with certain viewfinders and/or other accesories (anything that slows me down, helps).

Until the D300 my ratios with digital were as bad or worse than with 35mm roll film, but the D300 is turning out to be a lot like having LF, MF, and 35mm, all in one small package. I shot over 2,000 images today, and from the initial culling I'm sure there are a hundred or more images that are worth printing at 13x19. That's with the "motor" running, and much better than I'd have gotten with 35mm roll film, at better than 20:1.

At the other extreme, I've been using the live view and tripod the same way I use a LF sheet film camera view screen, and even though the image isn't inverted and flipped, I still get the shot I want pretty much every time I set up the camera, and I generally don't bracket (unless the lighting is particularly nasty). In that mode I'd guess that at least half the shots are keepers.

The lens I'm using, and my experience with it, also factors in. Right now I'm doing good to get any kind of keepers with the new fisheye lens. That will, or at least should, improve as I learn to use the thing a little better, but given it's limited uses that could take a very long time.

The bottom line for me is that I get more good pictures when I shoot tons of images, but I get a higher percentage of keepers when the gear makes me slow down.

"Snapshots" rarely produce images that suit me.

 

One thing I had to learn with digital, was not to cull too quickly. The image that doesn't suit me on the day it was taken, will often look wonderful when I look at it again a few months later. I've always kept every negative, so it was never a problem when I was shooting film, but I had to learn not to throw away my digital images in haste.

Cull cautiously, and keep anything that's even slightly questionable.