A co-worker of mine, Darren, suggested that it would be interesting to see what focal lengths are most popular in our image collections. He whipped up some perl code that would recurse through a directory hierarchy and spit out some data on lens focal length. I expanded the code a little so spit out per-image information and did some rudimentary digging with R.
One of the drawbacks, of course, is that only my EXIF tagged photos are represented here, or, put another way, only my digital photographs are represented here. I don’t much expect that the results would change in the film archives, except for the fact that I’d expect the 50mm focal length to return and 85mm to shine. Clearly I use these lengths a lot. You can also clearly see that I have no sub 70mm zoom capability in that the data shows very distinct peaks under the bottom end of the 70-200 zoom.
Also noteworthy is the fact that the 70-200/2.8 zoom is used almost exclusively at 70 or 200 and then again with the 1.4x TC when shooting sports. Combined with the 1.6x crop factor inherent in the 20D body and you can see that I have peaks at 320 and 450.
I also ran a quick check on metering modes, just to see what I use. I guessed that Av and M would tie with Tv a distant third. I was wrong. I shoot a ton more Manual mode (M) than I thought. (Thank you Ansel Adams and all you zone system junkies!).
Apertures – once again, I tend to shoot a lot at wide-open or nearly wide open. This is largely what drives my desire to keep my primes and my L zooms. Nothing, not even IS, can simulate the bokeh and speed of nice fast glass.
