Near Buckingham Palace
Do you have a favorite focal length? Are you a wide angle wizard, a T. Rex of telephotos, or a Normal Norman still clinging valiantly to the 50 mm equivalent? A question that flies in the face of common photographic sensibility might often provide some illuminating insight.
Last year, I purchased a really sweet Panasonic 7-14mm wide angle zoom lens. I did not practice using the lens very much before last year’s photo safari in Utah. While I used the lens and loved the images I made, I wondered if I “got my money’s worth” out of the lens. The wonderful folks at Adobe afforded me a precise answer that question using LightRoom Software. All the information formerly recorded in my official Fred Picker Zone VI exposure notebook is now called EXIF data. LightRoom will slice and dice that data in whatever manner pleases you. Drum roll, please!
Number of photographs at each focal length
(Only an Engineer would think of this.)
I sorted the EXIF data for each image by focal length and then by lens. I had to do this because both my lenses share a 14 mm focal length. (I shall valiantly avoid testing which 14 mm focal length is “better” because I am not that much of a gearhead.) I thought it was interesting that 26% of the exposures made on this year’s photo safari were made with the wide angle zoom. This data also confirms my devotion to the shorter focal lengths with the majority of my exposures made with the newer wide angle zoom and the shorter focal lengths of my standard 14-140 mm lens.
I will confess, I have always been a wide angle wizard. One of the first accessory lenses I purchased for my Canon F-1 was a Canon 17 mm f/4 rectilinear wide angle lens with a 104 degree field of view. I made a bunch of wonderful photographs with that lens. As a large format photographer I was unfulfilled until I hung a 90 mm Fuji f/8 on a 5 x 7 camera. Amazing sharpness and depth of field at the expense of focus, tilts, swings, rises or falls. But, I digress.
I have collected a bunch of data to ruminate upon. Knowing the focal length of all the photographs made in a project is interesting in a geeky kind of way. But the meaning of the data is much more important.
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