How many negatives have you shot in your life?

After buying the Nikon F4e I bought the MF-23...according to it I have taken over 35,000 shots...that was just one camera...not too sure how many in total for all my cameras but the number should be fairly high...the Nikon F5 shows around 9,000...
 
I actually took more photos before and after I opened up a studio. Too many expenses to deal with to be wasting film on personal projects at the time, and I never built up a client base. It was a fun eight months though.

Am in the process of doing some rearranging around here, and all the boxes full of negatives are coming together in one place now. I'm up to eight file boxes of negatives, and two of slides. More to go once I corral them all. There would have been much more, but there are gaps in my photography pursuits.

I'll never throw any of them out.

PF
 
Rounding generously, 3 rolls of 35mm = 100 shots; 30 rolls = 1000; 300 rolls = 10,000. So: certainly tens of thousands; quite possibly hundreds of thousands; probably under a million. That's just 35mm. Plus thousands of 120 and a (very few) thousand LF. Then there's Polaroid. Thousands of them too.

I can't really imagine either counting or caring, though.

Cheers,

R.
 
My personal stuff is about 12-15000 rolls of 35, 1000+ 120 and a couple of 100 4x5. Some years ago I went through my files and shredded any left over stuff that was shot for clients. Before that I had given some clients the original negs/skidees, just to make some space. Over the decades I must I have shot 30 000+ rolls of 35, probably 2-3000 rolls of 120 and a lot of 4x5/8x10. Most everything is filed in ClearVue pages and binders - tagged by year/month and with marks on the file pages as to what has been scanned or printed. Not perfect file system - but it works in a fashion.
Of course there are about 80 Carousel trays (140) with chromes - as well as a big box with several 100 file sheets with assorted slides. Now and then I am gripped by a "sorting" frenzy and go through these and shred some.
I find that Flickr helps - when I scan and upload I tag the image and if needed I can find the original negative/slide. Of course, not everything is good, most is mundane but somehow it holds some interest (to me at least) - and as time goes by - the images takes on a historical interest. Things change fast and a shot from only 15-20 years ago can be more interesting just because changes.
Of course, moving between countries and continents has taken its toll. A box of negative binders from the early 60's is forever lost. Which is too bad as negatives/slides also work as mnemonics - looking at them can put you back to a place and emotion.
 
I considered it a pita trying to bring order to negatives.

For my business, going 100% digital saved me. My filing system looked like this:
(I use iMac)

Make a folder titled year.
Then two folders, one for January - June. Another July - December
Then each month. I used 01 January, 02 February and so on. That way it would sort by number which kept the folders in the correct order.
Each gig listed in the month made.

If someone called and it was a wedding, all I needed them to tell me was year and month and I could find what they needed.

Same system for business portraits.

Truth be known, folks would order prints shortly after the event then that was it.

I still need to organize my personal film stuff.
I use the above to organize my personal digital files.
 
In the past i used to shoot only slides, I've got 10 slide boxes from the 90's, each fitting 100 slides so = 1000 slides / 36 per film = 27 slide films...

Lets suppose i shot 12 films a year (which i don't), so since 2008 that i went back to film, that makes it around 100 films.....

I need to shoot more....
 
How many breaths you took to get to the top of the mountain? Is it really important or how many times you have made it on the top?
Cheers, Ko.
 
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