I was poking around in my Aperture library after importing the latest batch of game photos from Evan's U5 soccer team today, and I realized that I've kept 2345 photos so far this year (on pace to keep well over 6000 in 2007). At the average ratio of keeps-per-deletes, that means I've shot well over 10,000 photos so far this year - and the year's not even half over yet - I might conceivably shoot over 30K photos in 2007.
Prompted by this realization, I wondered about what trend might be shown in the number of photographs I've kept over the last few years. I mined my Aperture library for the numbers, and threw them into Keynote to make a pretty graph. It's pretty obvious what happened when I switched from film to digital.
As soon as I stopped worrying about film (what ASA is in the camera? how many shots left? how much is this going to cost me?) the number of photos I took shot up exponentially. It's a little depressing to think of the awesome shots I missed out on from our wedding and honeymoon back in 1997, and the vacations and family stuff before the switch to digital. Even the first digital camera, although very low quality by 2007 standards, was a boon because it meant I could experiment and take more photos.
With that said, I've had my Canon EOS XT for almost a year now (got it for Father's Day 2006) and am still having a blast with it. I'd be willing to bet that this graph will begin to plateau. It's not feasible to be taking too many more photos while maintaining a day job and still seeing the family...
The last time I got all retrospective about my photographing habits was back in November 2006, when I realized that the number of "starred" images per month was rising dramatically, hinting that I'm becoming more happy with the shots I'm taking, or that I'm perceiving that I'm taking better photos, or that I'm taking so many more photos that I can delete most and be left with only good stuff.
Update: I added an estimated value for photos taken per year, as well as the number of photos "starred" per year and regenerated the graph.
