Wednesday 26 August 2009

Your favourite lens (and focal length)

After the last post I was intrigued as to what my 'favourite' lens is. My favourite lens would have to be a toss up between the 14-24mm f2.8, the 24mm PC-E or the 600mm f4. All these lenses allow me to create images that no other optic can. But what I was interested in was how many images are taken with these lenses. All are very specific tools, not everyday lenses but exotic optics used for specific purposes. I did a bit of digging and found a great tool that can search my Lightoom catalogue and reports back with some interesting info
Image Reporter analyses metadata in a Lightroom catalogue and reports on cropping, camera makes and models, lenses, average focal length, ISO, and more. Information it reports is astounding. Here are a few examples form my catalogue.

  • My most used lens is the 600mm followed by the 24-120, 24-70, 12-24 and 14-24 all in similar numbers. This is interesting that all these have a 24 in the number. After the 6 200mm lenses I use I regularly use 5 24mm lenses.
  • The average focal length of the 600 is 918, this is due to the fact that I am normally shooting with the 1.4 or the 1.7
  • TC. The average focal length of the 70-200 is 134mm. This shows that I am using both ends of the lens equally not like the 80-400 at 328mm, which show I am spending more time closer to 400mm.
  • The average of crop of all images in the library are 100% and of the images that are cropped the average crop is 85%.
I could go on with boring stats for a long time but they have nothing to do with you and your shooting so the best thing to do is go and check it out for yourself. You will learn a thing or two about your shooting style.
Image Reporter


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