How Much Did I Shoot in Beijing?

August 27th, 2008 by chuq

How Much Did I Shoot in Beijing?

Photography Comments Off

How Much Did I Shoot in Beijing? « Vincent Laforet’s Blog:

In Beijing, with a total of 6 cameras, I shot: 28,444 files for a total of a whopping 480 Gigabytes of Images! That’s INSANE! Even I am shocked.

So I looked into at what Sports Illustrated shot during the Olympics with their ten staff photographers there – SI shot over 300,000 images of which their staff kept 17,000. One of their editors took that down to 1046 “super selects” and then their director of photography Steve Fine, edited his selection down to 135 images. That means their “best of” turned out to be 0.045% of what they shot.

Six cameras. shot 28,444 images. 480 gigabytes of images.

Some of this, of course, is the reality of sports photography, where you set everything up, then mash the shutter and shoot 10 frames a second until it finishes or the camera fries or the card fills. Nature/action photographers understand, landscape photographers are confused… The ding rate is therefore huge, looking for that one special image/look/action/pose.

It makes me feel better about what I’ve been doing, though; I’ve gotten pretty ruthless at first pass editing and second pass culling (first pass, delete the dings, second pass, archive the technically okay but — nothing special — images). When I was in Sweet springs, I shot about 200 images of a common yellowthroat that was mostly not cooperative and a family of quail that was way TOO cooperative (“hi! take my picture? Let me jump up on this log.”) — and I ended up throwing out all but about 5 of the yellowthroat and only keeping two in my active library. Still going through the quail, but of maybe 60 shots, I’ll keep 5-6 in my active library and archive another 20-30. The rest of the shooting that day, almost all deleted (it wasn’t a great photo day, or birding day, but well-saved by these birds).

When I shot sports in high school, I tended to burn a lot of film. When I started shooting again in the 80′s and early 90′s, I tried to be more rational about eating film, and finally just faded back to black again (for many reasons); I’m finding digital a real joy, because it fits into how I like to shoot (as opposed to someone like ctein, who is very much a “one shot done very well is enough” type).

Part of mental shift in digital photography is the realization that taking the image isn’t the end of the creation process any more (yes, I know, those of us who have done wet darkroom stuff know there are still options in post processing there, but pretty limited and very time consuming) — now, the idea, I think, is to make sure you get what you need to finish the image on the computer.

Down that road lies two slippery slopes; one is the fight between the croppers and the don’t-crop crowds (and I’m a cropper who actually understands that you need to be good/smart enough to limit your cropping and do what you can taking the image first); Which, I guess, makes me a cropper who tries to not crop.

The second is the “I can fix it in photoshop” mentality, which is DEAD WRONG. you can finish it. You can improve it. You can polish it. but if the image is broken, you can’t really fix it, you can just limit the damage. I still believe in the process of getting it as right as possible in the camera.

I was seriously blown away with the quality of the photography at the olympics. I went into this olympics with more or less a shrug, but found myself really drawn in to some of the events — and it was the photography as much as the broadcasts (CBC, not NBC) that did it.

but then, every time I play with video, it just reinforces to me that ultimately, my vision is in the still image, not video.