Apparently I mostly shoot wide

EricMesa

- 2 minutes read - 400 words

Heard about Jeffrey Friedl’s lens focal length plot plugin for Lightroom and decided to check it out.  Here’s what it produced from my entire library.

Apparently I mostly shoot wide

Apparently I mostly shoot wide

Nearly 60% of my photos are in the wide to short telephoto range and nearly 40% is exclusively wide.  Now, I do have SOME photos from others in my Lightroom catalog, but not enough to skew the results.  I would say the reason for the huge concentration of photos in the 33-82mm range comes from the kit lens and its equivalent focal length USM version that I shoot a lot of photos with.  The large concentration around the 308-330mm range comes from the 1.6x crop factor of my XT and XTi on the Tamron 55-200mm I use for wildlife photography.

I’m shocked that I have so many photos at the wide end in the sense that I wouldn’t have guessed that if you’d asked me.  But, at the same time, I’m not surprised in that it was the only range I had for a while, a lot of indoor photography needs to be on the wide side, and now I’m also experimenting with wide angle shots.

I am very surprised that a full 10% of the photos were taken with a prime lens.  It was a while before I got my 50mm macro lens and I only got my 50mm f/1.8 this summer.  But I guess, like everyone else, I really like the properties of the 50mm lenses (even if they have more of a field of view of 80mm on my XT and XTi).

Unsurprisingly, I spend nearly 50% of the time either on the most wide or most telephoto end of my lens.  This makes sense because of the way I do photography - I tend to either want to be really close up or really far away.  So I either want to be as wide or telephoto as possible.  This is one of the reasons so many people end up recommending primes.  Not only do they (on average) have better optical qualities than a zoom lens, but most people spend most of their time at one focal length of their zoom anyway.  So why not just go for a prime and get the best out of it?

If you have Lightroom, you should definitely install this plugin and see what it tells you about your photographic style.