Choosing a lens

- If you've spent much time shooting and editing with any camera, you should be pretty comfortable with the idea of metadata. Metadata is all of that data that's stuffed into your image file that tells you when an image was shot, possibly where an image was shot and all of the settings on your camera, everything from shutter speed to aperture to focal length and lens that you were using and that's what we're going to talk about this week on The Practicing Photographer, how you can use that lens and focal length metadata to learn a lot of stuff about the way you shoot. The kind of stuff you're going to learn can do everything from helping inform lens purchases to helping you figure out where you might need to practice or work harder.

I'm here in Lightroom right now. Lightroom has a very good metadata browser that lets me look at multiple metadata criteria for a set of images at one time. I'm going to look at this folder called San Francisco which has 2,136 images in it. So, if I pull that up here and go to my metadata panel, I get these four columns. Each of these columns is a different criteria of metadata and they all stack together so I can set up different columns to view different combinations of different kinds of metadata. I'm going to open up this date item right here.

Each column is labeled and each one of these labels is actually a popup menu. If I pull this up and choose camera, I can see that I've shot with wow, I've shot with cameras I don't even remember. I've shot with a lot of cameras over the years in San Francisco, so I don't actually want to look at all of these images because I'm now shooting with this Fuji X-T2. I want to know what my lens usage is like on this camera because different cameras of course have different focal length equivalencies and this has a particular sensor size and so on and so forth. There's no need to clutter my analysis here with a bunch of data from some Canon cameras.

So, I'm going to come down here to where I see X-T1, X-T2. X-T1 and X-T2, those are the different removable lens cameras that I've used that all have the same compatible lenses as what I'm shooting with now. So, I'm going to select those. Now, I selected those by clicking on one of them and then shift clicking on another and it selected all the ones in between. So, now I'm only looking at images that have been shot by Fuji cameras that have removable lenses. If I come over here to the next column and pop this menu open, I can then go and choose lens.

Aha, look at this. These are all of the Fuji lenses that I've ever used with the number of photos that I've shot in San Francisco for each lens. So, this is pretty interesting. I can see that I have unequivocally shot the most with the 18 to 55, that's the kit lens, the lens that comes with the camera. I have shot to a lesser degree with an 18 to 135 which I no longer own, so I guess I shot 46 pictures with that in San Francisco and then decided to get rid of it. I've shot some not so much with very long telephoto lenses so I can see that I'm mostly staying within kind of a normal, walk around lens sort of range.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this system, this the 18 to 55 is pretty much the equivalent of a 24 to 70 on a full-frame camera. Now, what's cool here is I can go a little bit deeper here. I can click on this lens, the 18 to 55 and now change this popup menu to say focal length and now I can see the actual focal lengths that I've shot with on all of these images. Now, before we go on, I want to say that obviously in San Francisco I do a particular type of shooting. I'm mostly doing street shooting. Maybe there's a little bit of landscape shooting but I need to keep that in mind that I'm in a situation that probably going to lead me or going to bias me towards certain focal lengths.

So, I can see here here are seven images that I shot at 24.3 millimeters. Now, bear in mind this is a zoom lens. It's not that I'm sitting around imagining and visualizing at 24.3 millimeters, I'm framing up a shot in the lens and some of them just happen to come out with weird focal lengths. What's interesting about this is I can see 18 millimeters, 85 images. Over here at the other end, 55 millimeter, I've shot 54 images and here in the middle range, 23 to 27 is probably when I shot most of my other images, so I'm pretty much staying either fully wide, somewhere in the middle or pretty telephoto but far and away I'm shooting mostly very wide.

So, that tells me a lot of things. If this were my only lens, actually that's not the 18 to 55 on there right now, this is the 18 to 55, if the 18 to 55 were the only lenses that I had and I wanted to go lens shooting, then I would go, maybe I'd look at the wider angle. Maybe I ought to consider that nice 14 millimeter that Fuji sells. This is a great way to figure out what is a good next lens for me if I only have one lens. If I own a lot of lenses, I can still get some valuable data from this. I can learn that I tend to shoot more at some focal lengths than others.

Well, I have several lenses that shoot say at 55 millimeters. That's a focal length that I'm using a lot on here. Maybe I now want to go to my 55 to 200 and figure out which one is better in terms of image quality. There's just lots of ways to apply this metadata to an understanding of how I shoot. One thing that I look at when I see this is when I look at my lens list I see that I rarely shoot with my 55 to 200 or my 100 to 400. Now, the first place I could go is to say well, maybe that means I don't need those lenses, maybe this is a good way of figuring out lenses that I could sell or I could go no, this means I need to practice with those focal lengths.

I'm not shooting much at really long telephoto and I know from experience that I'm not great at pre-visualizing long telephoto shots and at least in the city this data is backing that up. So, there a lot of things that I can learn from this. If you're wanting to use this to consider lens purchases, then what you might want to do is say rent a batch of lenses, shoot for a while with them, rent a bunch of lenses for a week, maybe not all at the same time but rent some lenses, shoot with them, return the lenses, then sit down and analyze your metadata and figure out where you are naturally falling in the focal length range.

I'm using Adobe Lightroom to do this. You could just as easily do this with Bridge, Aperture, Photo Mechanic, any image editor or browser that let's you look at the metadata for a batch of images. So, very simple way to figure out how I've been shooting and that can inform how I might want to shoot in the future, what lenses I might want to buy or even what lenses I might want to get rid of.