Reached 10,000 photos in my archive last night and it hit me different

I was scrolling through my hard drive looking for a shot of the Pleiades from last winter and noticed the folder count hit exactly 10,000 images. That's ten THOUSAND times I pointed a camera at the sky and pressed the shutter. Most of them are trash of course, like 8,000 are just blurry streaks or clouds ruining everything. But the 200 or so keepers in there represent every clear night I stayed up past 2 AM and froze my fingers off. Has anyone else ever calculated how many exposures they've taken versus actual good results?

2 comments

2 Comments

holly_henderson8613d ago

Have you ever gone back and calculated your actual keeper rate from those all-nighters? I did that once with my deep sky stuff and realized I keep maybe 3 out of every 100 shots I take, and that's being generous. The real kicker for me was when I started deleting the obvious garbage on the spot, like cloud-covered frames or missed focus, before I ever bothered to stack them. It saves a ton of hard drive space and makes finding those 200 gems way less painful.

anna_fox713d ago

You ever stop and wonder how much sleep you've traded for all those shots? I did the math on my astrophotography folders once and it was brutal. I shoot maybe 200 frames a night on a good run, and after stacking and culling, I'm lucky if I keep 10 good ones. The rest is just expensive hard drive space full of star trails from forgetting to lock the tripod. Problem is, I can't bring myself to delete the junk either, because every so often I go back and find one random frame with a meteor or satellite I missed.