Fans of digital photography: On a vacation, how many pictures do you take on one day (average)?

Maybe five or ten a day. I think it is fucked people are so concerned about “sharing” that they only see the cool things through a lens.

Dancing at a concert is a lot more fun than recording it and getting a few likes on youtube.

I don’t know if I can be considered on fan level. I probably take an average of 30 in a week. I say week, because some days I will take none and others do 15 in one day. It also depends how scenic the trip is. If we are at the beach the whole time I only need so many photos of the same beach. When we went to Alaska there were mountains, bodies of water, glaciers, family photos, excursion photos. That week-long trip might have had 50 photos.

@johnpowell – I don’t upload my photos. They are just for private use.

As @JLeslie said, it depends on how scenic the trip is. If it’s very scenic and it’s a place I haven’t been to before, I might take 125 to 150 pics per day, then deleting about 10 to 15% of them upon evening review, then deleting maybe another 10% after uploading and viewing them on the PC. Lately, I also like to use the movie function on my camera, especially since still photos can be easily made from any movie scene.

Well, Australia was very scenic, @2davidc8, so it seems that your numbers and mine are similar.

I think there’s a point when an avid shutterbug can spend too much time capturing images rather than fully taking in the sights and truly enjoying them. My dad did that, and that was long before the days of digital. We wound up with boxes and boxes of slides and snaps that I don’t recall he or any of us looking at. I can’t say what that point is or that it’s the same point for everybody, and I’m not assuming everyone who takes a lot of photos misses the pleasure of the moment. I’m just saying…

By the way, I have two digital cameras and rarely use either.

I’m not quite at your level; after 10 days in Yellowstone, Grand Tetons, and Glacier, I had 1600. Costa Rica (9 days) was 1200.

Very few. I have lost many cameras overboard or while diving. Some very good ones, in fact. If I carry a camera at all, it is a one-time-use waterproof throwaway. They take adequate pictures. It’s pretty hard to screw up a shot when you’re photographing paradise. But since I’m usually busy handling the boat and my interest in photography has dwindled over the years (being a witness to life, rather than actually living it got to me after a while), I am dependent on the kindness of others to email me photos they have taken while aboard my vessel or on land adverntures, and it is well known that the kindness of others is quite undependable. So, ho hum, I go through life mostly undocumented and discreetly keep fond memories mostly in my head.

A 4-week trip to a country on the other side of the world would definitely result in thousands of photos for me. I sometimes use the burst-mode on my Lumix point-and-shoot when there’s action and movement. My fiancé has a Sony DSLR and he takes very creative pictures.

I don’t recall how many pics I had, but I’m sure that our 9-day trip to New Orleans resulted in well over 1000 photos between the cameras and the phones for both of us.

@syz – 10 days with 1600 pics translates to 160 pics per day, so you are very close to his 180.

Since I got a digital camera the number of pics I take has increased dramatically. Hundreds a day. Heck, I can delete them so why not.
On a two week trip through Alaska I took over 2000 photos. In the Grand Canyon it was over 2500 and I used two cameras.
Before digital, I used to take 5 rolls of 36 exposure Ektachrome film for a weeklong trip. Sometimes I brought back an unused roll but not very often; most of the time I ended up buying another roll during the trip instead.

When I’m on a shoot I capture a lot more than that but I also delete a lot too. I’d love to go to Australia one day and take lots of shots!

I’m a 35 year free lance photographer. When on vacation, I purchase post cards.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I didn’t see that coming! :)

I typically take about 40 shots in a day, of which maybe half will be deleted and half of whats left get uploaded somewhere like Flickr. I don’t postphotos on Facebook.

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies I don’t think that is uncommon. I had a good friend in college who was a photographer on the school paper and yearbook staff and had a part time job at the local paper (mainly Friday night HS game shoots). He refused to take a camera with him when we went caving. Said he couldn’t get enjoyment out of it any more.
Even though he kept on working for newspapers and eventually became editor of a small town edition; in later years he did take it up again as a hobby.

I’m looking at Matt’s numbers, 3700 images… And that just looks like a job to me. Nothing particularly enjoyable about editing that number of images. But if it’s not your job, I can see how one may enjoy it.

Most of my work is commercial advertising and magazine editorial. 2–4K images per job. That’s two or three days of editing alone, and does not include the time for finishing treatments on the final selects.

I’d be more inclined to purchase a fine art work and support a local creative. They can study the scene for months to get the perfect image. Highly unlikely I could accomplish the same with an hour or so at the same location.

If I did take a camera, it would more than likely be an old school film camera limited to one 36exp roll. And then just take my snapshots to the local one hour lab for a set of album prints and a disc for sharing… simply to note the memory.

But much of my decision would depend on whether I was traveling alone, or with a companion. I do photo excursions all the time. It’s a work related trip, to produce artwork, or to photo J a story. It’s not a vacation by any means, carrying more equipment bags than luggage, and being held to a client deadline and invoicing budget requirements.

I took 1500 pictures in six days on St Thomas and St John, a lot of them underwater (snorkeling, yay!).
The ‘best of’ selection, i.e. worth showing to others, has on average around two dozen per day.

I can easily take 200 or 300 in a day.

Yes, I needed two weekends and several evenings to edit the pictures and create the final selection.

I seem to be an avid shutterbug, but still remind myself to fully take in the sights and truly enjoy them. Actually, when looking for good motifs, this sometimes means paying more (not less) attention to details of what’s going on around you. But shutterbugs can irritate others (in my case my wife), when they have to stop all the time and wait till the shutterbug is done taking the picture. A solution to this is doing things in parallel. In national parks for example my wife reads most of the details on all the signs, especially when they are about species of animals and plants (she’s a biologist). When she’s busy with that, I have plenty of time to take pictures. In cities she pays far more attention to shop windows. Again, a great opportunity to find great motifs. For example capture strangers using the powerful zoom without them noticing. It’s even possible to take picture while walking and glancing at the camera display, which didn’t work 20 years ago. When I was 14, I had to use a separate exposure meter and make decisions about aperture and shutter speed. And focusing wasn’t automatic either.

It is a piece of work to deal with all the pictures while on vacation (backups!) and when you get home, but I enjoy it. It’s part of the vacation to recollect the parts captured in the pictures, and to find a few that are worth sharing around with friends and relatives.

But as @mattbrowne and others will note, it’s important to keep the photography in perspective and not miss the vacation for the sake of the shots. There are are usually a few really special bits of which I don’t have any photos at all because I just turned off the camera and soaked up the scenery.

Does anyone else have a problem actually deleting substandard photos from a trip?

I just can’t do it. I dump them into a big file labeled “Rejects” and every once in a while I look through it, pull out something interesting and try to crop/edit/rework it to make something decent out of it.

^^ No, I am easily able to figure out which photos are good and which ones need to be deleted immediately. I actually enjoy the organizational process, it’s like I’m reliving the vacation all over again.

@rojo – It depends. If these “rejects” are just very similar pictures of the basically same scene, I don’t see a problem.

@rojo I agree with @mattbrowne – I often take several shots of the same scene and keep only the best one.

@mattbrowne , @downtide No, I agree, I take multiple shots and I keep the one I think is the “best” in the show file but I guess I just figure, what the heck, its only using a little bit of memory if I keep the others as well, I just don’t show them. Into the reject file they go. Maybe it is my version of hoarding.
In the back of my mind I imagine someone going through the file after I die and asking themselves “Why did he reject that one, it is a great shot”.