As with my "The Daughter's Devil" series, I was using shutter drag for this series of photos. I did this exercise over two days, Wednesday and Thursday and think that I managed to get three or maybe four good shots out of about five hundred. One out of a hundred. That's pretty much what I try for, and I was chuffed to bits when I saw today's Blog by Thom Hogan saying he was happy to get one good shot out of every seventy-six attempts!
"Mar 23 (commentary)--It seems that my 1 in 76 frames comment in the Steller Blur notes (currently above but will be gone when this rolls over to the 2010 News page) has provoked a number of "thank yous."
Why? Because it appears that some of you (used to) think that pros just go out and shoot 100% keepers. A good pro will generally have a higher keeper rate than a good amateur, but it's still not 100%. And that's for "normal" shooting. Throw in an animal moving randomly and an attempt to do something aggressive like pan blur, and the keeper rate for even the best pro will be low. If I recall correctly, Art Wolfe used to say that he shot hundreds of rolls of film (thousands of shots, perhaps more than ten thousand) to get the 125 images for his book Rhythms of the Wild."
So don't be afraid to try new techniques and fail at them. I failed 75 times before I got something I liked. Actually, I failed 450 times and got 3 images I liked. And yes, it took me longer to get the first interesting image than the second or third. Practice works. That's why I do it as much as possible.
Nikon D3s and Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 lens. Hand held and remote triggered SB 800 and SB 900 Speedlights.
Exposures were anywhere from 1.3 seconds to four seconds, hand-held.
Wednesday's shots were at night under one set of ambient light conditions, Thursday morning's shots were under another set of ambient light conditions -- early morning window light. And on Thursday morning I tried some really long hand-held exposures, five seconds and more.
-- Vince Hemingson
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