Perfecting Your Session: How Many Shots to Take, Keep, and Share

^{Note: This tip comes from a Reddit discussion - How many shots and how to decide?}

Here was a question posted on Reddit regarding a new bird photographer.

“I am new and learning, so sorry if this is a ridiculous question, but I can't find any discussions regarding this. My question is, how many shots do you come home with after a session shooting birds, and how do you decide which to keep? I know it depends on time in the field, camera settings, etc., but I come home with 500+ shots from a quick trip to the wetlands. Also, keeping the best image(s) is the obvious answer to my second question, but how do you decide what's best, what to look for, and how many "best" images do you actually keep? It's a very daunting task going through that many photos, and I find myself keeping more than necessary.”

For the QT today, I am going to provide you with two of the best answers in my humble opinion.

Tip #1 - I recently returned from a whole day shooting birds in flight with 2000 photos. Roughly 700 of those made it from card to computer, and I ended up keeping approximately 450. Out of those, I fully post-processed and exported around 50.

The first aspect is always the overall sharpness and sharpness of the head and eyes. Then I look for the composition and the bird's posture (wing position, head position, beak, ...) and finally stuff like lighting, background, ...

Obviously, I will end up with a bunch of similar-looking photos; I tend to keep all of them (disk space is cheap) but look for more and more minor details (feathers at the wing tips, claw position, etc.) to decide which one I will post-process fully.

Tip #2 - Take as many as you can, especially since you are new to it. As someone has said already, memory/disk space is cheap. As you improve your skills, you will learn not to take or need as many shots to get a keeper. It is daunting to go through all the photos you have. A trick I have learned (with Lightroom) is to go through your photos and rate them 1 or 2. Then delete all the 1s, go back through them, and rate them 2 or 3. Delete all the 2s. Continue until you have your "keepers" then do your editing.

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