The Online Photographer

...What's the most you've ever shot in a day?

Do you even have any idea?

For me, with film, I believe it was six rolls of 35, or 210 shots; and that was a challenge. John Gossage used to assign his graduate students to shoot 10 rolls in a day, and I might have tried that once. I don't remember. (I shot 35 frames rather than 36 on a roll because 7x5 fit in a PrintFile negative page.)

I'm sure I've exceeded 210 shots with digital but I don't have a read on precise numbers. Not often, though. I'm a light shooter, even when I'm shooting heavy.

Just wondering, following the previous post and some of the comments.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Manuel: "That's a very curious question. The first time I used a digital camera was some eight years ago, when a friend lent me a Canon Ixus so that I'd shoot a guided pedestrian tour in my hometown. I think I shot a mammoth eight pictures that day! My friend just laughed at me: 'you could have taken a thousand pictures,' she told me after a lecture on memory cards and battery life, with the kind of tone teachers employ to their dumbest students. I knew about all that, but somehow I hadn't shaken off the old habits of film and had shot sparsely.

"When my first serious digital camera arrived I used to shoot a lot, but never exceeded a hundred pictures per day (of which I'd save half a dozen at most). Seeing how poor those pictures were, I decided to shoot less and think more about what I was doing, being more careful when choosing my subjects and taking due care with exposure and perspective.
Then I converted to film and dropped digital photography. Now a film roll can last me several weeks. (I only photograph on weekends.) I only shoot what I find to be worth photographing, and that is if I can get a good picture out of it.

"In a nutshell, I never shot a lot. I believe there's nothing to be learned out of filling a memory card in a day. People should be more selective about their subjects instead of shooting everything they see. In fact, if I were a photography teacher I'd oblige my students to use film cameras, so that they'd learn the intrinsic value of each picture.
Besides, what's the point of filling several external drives with meaningless pictures?"

Matt Greer: "I occasionally get to shoot sports, so the number gets high pretty quickly. I've photographed marathons for a company that wanted three photos of every runner you can get. At a marathon in Calgary, Alberta this year, I broke 18,000 pictures. While that was easily a record for me, they guy next to me was over 24,000, which is also amazing for a not-so-huge race. Fortunately, this company provides the cameras, so my shutter is still intact."

James: "986—digital. Same camera and 100mm macro lens—poison dart frogs, snakes and other reptiles. And a red-kneed tarantula."

Jack Nelson: "I was shooting a fiesta in Mexico once where people were in costumes and dancing in processions. A friend suggested I shoot JPEG so I could shoot bursts. I got home and had about 2,500 shots and it took me a couple of weeks to wade through that many shots. I ended up with about as many good shots as I would if I was shooting normally (maybe 250 shots would be normal for a fiesta like that). I'll never shoot that many again."

psu (partial comment): " Taking a lot of pictures is actually tiring. You have to train up to be able to do it, IMHO."

Dave Levingston: "Back in the bad old days when I was doing newspaper work it was routine for me to shoot 10 rolls of Tri-X a day. And that had to all be developed, edited, printed and captions written before I went home for the day. And people wonder why I don't miss the darkroom.

"Since digital came along I shoot a lot more. Without checking I'm sure I've done 5–6,000 frames in a day on many occasions. Those newspaper days taught me to shoot everything and sort it out later. That's ingrained in me and it's just how I work. Digital has made it a lot less painful and much more affordable."

scott kirkpatrick: "Maybe Kirk Tuck will weigh in here. In his blog he says with some satisfaction that he just shot 4,500 images in a four-day assignment. Not me. 50–100 images when with family for a few hours is more typical, maybe 200–300 for a day. If I go out on the prowl by myself, I can accumulate 100 an hour, but I can't keep it up all day."

Roger Bradbury (partial comment): "A screen full of almost identical photos to choose from fills me with despair, so I try to get it right in as few exposures as possible. I aim for 'do it once, do it right.'"

Bryce Lee: "In days gone by?

"Easy. A now-deceased friend and myself covered the last day of operation of the Bloor-Danforth streetcar line in Toronto before it was replaced with the current subway. We were using four Nikon F2's and F3's with motor drives.

"We started on the east end and worked our way west shooting all the time. I had a large backpack with 60 bricks(20 rolls x 36 exposures of Kodachrome). He had a similar backback for the exposed rolls. We had opened all the boxes and labelled the unexposed rolls with write on masking tape so we could keep track of who shot what. I used blue ink for mine, he used red ink.

"As noted started on one end with a day pass each, and covered the line end to end, twice.

"The next morning went to work stopping off at Kodak Canada on Eglinton Avenue West before going to work at the local school board offices a mile away. The slides were all ready by about four p.m.

"Something like 40 bricks were exposed, and yes there were a few duds. Thankful too for spare batteries for the drives. Still and all about 26,000 colour slides give or take. Then we had to label the slides!

"And from that one day...made gobs of money selling last day images to all and sundry...still have some remaining to this day. PCC street cars are gone, my friend is gone, Kodachrome and Kodak are gone as well. Am feeling my age...."

Ken: "On safari in Botswana, I shot between several hundred and somewhere north of 1200 (digital, RAW) frames of wildlife per day, depending on the action and the light. It is easy to get excited and shoot a lot of frames (especially at dusk and dawn) when photographing big cats or African painted dogs hunting, a huge herd of cape buffalo on the move, a family of elephants heading to the water, birds in flight, and so on."

Rod Thompson: "Years ago on a trip to Prague, I rationed myself to five rolls of film a day over three weeks and found it hard to use all of it. These days five 8 GB cards would do the same trip (RAW 16MP).

"I work in the industry (sales and printing) and am seeing a real increase in 'image clog' from a lot of customers. I wonder what the average life span of an image is in the digital world, six months? We still get in negatives from WWI regularly to copy and I often wonder if the original will still outlast the digital file!"

Chad Thompson: "Unfortunately these days the bread is buttered eight hours a day at 24 FPS."

Patrick Dodds: "All day coverage at a wedding might net me c. 2,000 pictures but I'm a heavy editor and am likely to share only about 250–300 of those, edited. I'm trying to shoot less as it makes me love the job more, but blinks, awkward body movements, rapidly changing expressions and numerous other factors mean that I am likely to always overshoot at weddings and other social occasions. I use flash sparingly in part so as to minimise the impact of so many photographs being taken.

"The hardest part of it all? Relaxing, letting go, letting my style come to the fore. Looking at fewer of other people's pictures is likely to help in this regard and will hopefully enable me to take fewer pictures of better quality—improvement is endless."

Patrick: "I'm a wedding photographer. Brides expect unreasonable numbers of images any more. While I carefully select and edit my images to about 500, I'll regularly shoot between 1,700 and 2,500 in a day. And, believe it or not, I don't machine gun it. Wedding days are long, and there's a lot happening to capture. I once delivered 900 images to a bride who later complained that all her friends got twice that number from their wedding photographers. There's no pleasing some people. Personally I thought 900 was excessive."