I am now at just my 6th month point of being into "wildlife" photography. I have found that with NO culling at all, I'm at a rate of 8 TB per year mostly using a Nikon Z9 or same size Canon R52. There is some Canon 24 Mp R1 and 20Mp 1Dx3 as well as some 20 Mp Nikon D6. But I'm betting that my ratio will be 74% are the 45Mp bodies.
FWIW, I do NOT really use high speed shutter, hardly ever. In part this is due to just so many years of shooting only as fast as my finger will go but also truly not wanting to deal with 10,000 images the night of an afternoon out. I am thoroughly annoyed when it's even 4500 or so. In fact I was almost happy to find recently on a 4500 outing over a few hours that the first half where I';d been shooting across too much warm mud that none of them would be good due to that atmospheric degradation. So I just jumped about 2200 ahead to when I had moved to a better spot shooting mostly over water vs that warmed mud.
However, if I could user that program that someone mentioned that helps automatically with the out of focus stuff, then I could see using maybe 10-20 fps for when things are moving more or action is happening. Currently I do have kind of a sweet spot shutter speed setting for me which is "low speed shutter" but set to 3-5 which means that a quick dab of the finger results in a single shot while holding down gets you the chosen 3 to 5. Above 5 I find it's harder to get just one frame. At 3 it's easy. Oh, and on Canon to utilize raw "pre-capture", you have to have shutter set to at least low speed but then you can back that down to the 3-5 zone and kind of have the best of both, if your goal like mine is to minimize massive capture counts.
For "culling" I would first do a wave to remove the inevitable out of focus shots at the very least, and then a wave of all the "face turned away" shots, and the "meh" shots. I imagine, having gone through to process my selects, that culling of just those would result in a 75% or higher reduction, which would put my archive down to just 2TB annually, which is much more manageable.
I am having to rethink this whole thing because for 22 years, I only shot what I needed for my commercial architectural work, and then I of course archived all the raws as there were only the ones needed for the multiple exposures for layering a manual "hdr" image plus any extras for things like people walking here and there, a cloud over here, and blending twilight with post sunset and pre sunset, or shifted frames for stitching.
All of those are archived but its still really not that many compared to just a few hours with an active pond and birds scene.
Then, my archive structure was always RAW only on one drive and the produced images which were PSD and tiffs on different drives, then both of those redundantly backed up, the "work" drive space ended up being nearly the same used size as the RAW drive. This made archive structuring and HDD buying very easy to plan.
Now though, the RAW drive space archive is huge compared to the "produced" images work drive because the produced image is from one single shot, not 5-7 layers for exposure, plus 5-7 more for a shifted stitching situation, and not the 5-8 more image layers for the various add-on items, then all the "adjustment layers" all in PS resulting in files too big for basic TIFF and requiring that master file to be a PSD archived, then lfattened to the 16 bit tiff, then an 8 bit tiff for the client and of course level 10 full size jpegs for other buyers.
Now it's just manipulations in LRC and we're done, one tiff at 16 bit, save an 8 but at downsized 2500 pixels to show off on here, and the space needed is next to nothing.
Now, who was it that mentioned that "out of focus" sorting/filtering/easy to see, culling software program ????
Was it @DRwyoming or was it @NorthernFocus ?
Sort of separately, I wonder if other people are like me, using an NVME drive on a pcie card as their "working" space, then having all of that nightly backed up to a couple HDD using Carbon Copy Cloner - which is what I've been doing for many years. I basically have 4 locations of any chosen image. The first raw, a backup drive of all those raw (both of those also are backups of either Capture one settings or LRC), then the produced images are also on their own NVME drive but then backed up to a larger HDD. Periodically both of those are also backed up externally but all of these drives are set up so that they could simply be removed and plugged into any new computer for access if something happened to a motherboard or OS which is all separate.
FWIW, I do NOT really use high speed shutter, hardly ever. In part this is due to just so many years of shooting only as fast as my finger will go but also truly not wanting to deal with 10,000 images the night of an afternoon out. I am thoroughly annoyed when it's even 4500 or so. In fact I was almost happy to find recently on a 4500 outing over a few hours that the first half where I';d been shooting across too much warm mud that none of them would be good due to that atmospheric degradation. So I just jumped about 2200 ahead to when I had moved to a better spot shooting mostly over water vs that warmed mud.
However, if I could user that program that someone mentioned that helps automatically with the out of focus stuff, then I could see using maybe 10-20 fps for when things are moving more or action is happening. Currently I do have kind of a sweet spot shutter speed setting for me which is "low speed shutter" but set to 3-5 which means that a quick dab of the finger results in a single shot while holding down gets you the chosen 3 to 5. Above 5 I find it's harder to get just one frame. At 3 it's easy. Oh, and on Canon to utilize raw "pre-capture", you have to have shutter set to at least low speed but then you can back that down to the 3-5 zone and kind of have the best of both, if your goal like mine is to minimize massive capture counts.
For "culling" I would first do a wave to remove the inevitable out of focus shots at the very least, and then a wave of all the "face turned away" shots, and the "meh" shots. I imagine, having gone through to process my selects, that culling of just those would result in a 75% or higher reduction, which would put my archive down to just 2TB annually, which is much more manageable.
I am having to rethink this whole thing because for 22 years, I only shot what I needed for my commercial architectural work, and then I of course archived all the raws as there were only the ones needed for the multiple exposures for layering a manual "hdr" image plus any extras for things like people walking here and there, a cloud over here, and blending twilight with post sunset and pre sunset, or shifted frames for stitching.
All of those are archived but its still really not that many compared to just a few hours with an active pond and birds scene.
Then, my archive structure was always RAW only on one drive and the produced images which were PSD and tiffs on different drives, then both of those redundantly backed up, the "work" drive space ended up being nearly the same used size as the RAW drive. This made archive structuring and HDD buying very easy to plan.
Now though, the RAW drive space archive is huge compared to the "produced" images work drive because the produced image is from one single shot, not 5-7 layers for exposure, plus 5-7 more for a shifted stitching situation, and not the 5-8 more image layers for the various add-on items, then all the "adjustment layers" all in PS resulting in files too big for basic TIFF and requiring that master file to be a PSD archived, then lfattened to the 16 bit tiff, then an 8 bit tiff for the client and of course level 10 full size jpegs for other buyers.
Now it's just manipulations in LRC and we're done, one tiff at 16 bit, save an 8 but at downsized 2500 pixels to show off on here, and the space needed is next to nothing.
Now, who was it that mentioned that "out of focus" sorting/filtering/easy to see, culling software program ????
Was it @DRwyoming or was it @NorthernFocus ?
Sort of separately, I wonder if other people are like me, using an NVME drive on a pcie card as their "working" space, then having all of that nightly backed up to a couple HDD using Carbon Copy Cloner - which is what I've been doing for many years. I basically have 4 locations of any chosen image. The first raw, a backup drive of all those raw (both of those also are backups of either Capture one settings or LRC), then the produced images are also on their own NVME drive but then backed up to a larger HDD. Periodically both of those are also backed up externally but all of these drives are set up so that they could simply be removed and plugged into any new computer for access if something happened to a motherboard or OS which is all separate.
