In answer to the question in the title, a ton. I’m not a great photographer, but I’m a pretty good experimenter and I can (mostly) recognize a good photograph when I see it. What I can’t do is reliably create one. So, I take A LOT of pictures to come up with the shots I include in each episode. Sometimes, they’re versions of the final shot. Often times there are whole photo sessions that I throw out and start over when I can’t get the results I want.
To give a better sense of what it looks like backstage here at the Small Life Stories studio, here are all of the photographs I took (or used) to create the first 4 pages of the Betwixt episode I’m working on – roughly 300 in all. Out of these, I’ve ended up selecting 10 photos to fill those pages, plus a few public domain images for the crazy wall. 3% is lower then my usual “success” ratio, but I was trying out a bunch of new things (like the disco light shots), so I ended up throwing away most of my shots.