 |
| Old Point Comfort Lighthouse, Ft. Monroe, Virginia (click to enlarge) This lighthouse was put in service in 1803 and is still in service and maintained by the U.S. Coast Guard. It is 58 ft. (17.6m) tall and is made from sandstone. Fujifilm X-T2, 16-55mm f/2.8 lens @ 55mm; 1/500th sec. @ f/11; ISO 200 |
At the end of each calendar year, I always try to look back and analyze my photography. I then try to compare the immediate past year with previous years in order to better understand how my vision and photographic technique evolves. For example, I will look at how many images I made with the various focal lengths, taking into consideration the format, then assess if I am using more wide angle, more telephoto, more normal focal length lenses than in previous years. I will look at what ISOs I predominantly used. These types of looks back will give me an idea of my photographic way of seeing is changing, if my subject matter is changing, which lenses are my most important and which get little or no use.
Another example from the past is that I discovered that when I have a zoom lens mounted, for whatever reason, I tended to use the widest and longest focal lengths much more often than any other focal lengths on any particular zoom. For example, if I were using my Fujifilm 16-55mm f/2.8 lens, I would tend to shoot more at 16mm and 55mm than any focal length in between. I haven't yet figured out why but it does give me some insight into how I see the world.
Here are some preliminary stats I pulled up from Lightroom. A note: These types of stats, to me, are one of the most valuable aspects of a program such as Lightroom as the database allows me to a) keyword and copyright my images upon import, records which camera, lens, focal length, ISO, shutter speed, time, day, year, etc., etc., etc., for of all of my images. As I said, for statistical analysis of what you have done or to just find certain images, that database is essential. I could not move away from LR to another program if it didn't afford me this attribute. But I digress...
Total Images Made for 2017 (as of December 28th)* 21139
My two main cameras are the:
Olympus E-M1 Mark II 9220
Fujifilm X-T2 11552
Olympus E-M1 Mark II
RAW 6179
JPEG 2972
(Sometimes I shoot only RAW and sometimes I shoot RAW + JPEG for testing purposes or when using a feature in the camera that only works with JPEGs)
1st 12-100mm f/4 5930
2nd Most used lens 12-40mm f/2.8 1893
3rd Most used lens 40-150mm f/2.8 806
Most Used Focal Lengths
(To get a general understanding of what your focal length trends are, you really need to group focal lengths because LR breaks them down by individual focal lengths such as 44.1, 44.3, 67, 79, etc. I haven't done that here (didn't have the time) but will over the weekend. But I would normally group focal lengths by traditional 35mm lens focal lengths such as 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm, etc., adding together the number of images made with the focal lengths closest to these traditional ones. In other words, I would add focal lengths 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38mm and call it 35mm to reduce the vast number of individual focal lengths into groups would gives me a better general understanding.
12mm 542
25mm 406
40mm 1497
100mm 1833
35mm 418
Most Used ISOs
200 6156
800 663
400 478
3200-6400 911
(Using ISOs 3200-6400 and the same high ISOs with the X-T2 really surprised me, I normally don't shoot with high ISOs, typically less than 2% of my work. I'll have to look into why this year I shot so many images with very high ISOs.)
Fujifilm X-T2 11552
RAW 8584
JPEG 2863
Most Used Lens
1st 16-55mm f/2.8 4667
2nd 35mm f/2 2303
3rd 50-140mm f/2.8 2017
4th 10-24mm f/4 295 (surprised at this, thought there would be more!)
Most Used Focal Lengths (again, really need to group them as I mentioned above)
16mm 683
35mm 2303 (mainly from using the 35mm f/2 lens)
55mm 1177
196mm 556
400mm 649
Most Used ISOs
200 3664
3200-6400 2847 (again, a very BIG surprise to me!)
400 1496
800 1196
(With the X-T2, I often pick ISO 800 when light is low due to lower digital noise at this ISO versus ISO 400 or 500; a quirk of the camera's engineering, I think)
Another statistic I have not yet looked at is most used shutter speeds. Again, as with ISOs and focal lengths, one has to add together close shutter speeds to get an idea as LR lists them in small increments such as 1/50th, 1/60th, etc. Again, I use traditional 35mm shutter speeds as that gives me a general, and understandable, idea of what shutter speeds I tend to use most.
As you can see from these preliminary figures, I found out some big surprises about my photography this past year. The biggest, I think, is the use of high ISOs for so many images. I'll have to do some research and find out why. Very unusual.
Lesson Learned: Statistical analysis of your own photography can not only help with better understanding what you are doing, but can help in purchasing decisions for the future. By having the gear that best fits your needs, you can optimize your image making and produce many more satisfying photographs.
*If one were to total up the numbers they do not add up correctly and that is because of various aspects of this short statistical analysis that are not included. These are general figures to give me a general idea of what I had done over the past 12 months.
Thanks for looking. Enjoy!
Dennis A. Mook
All content on this blog is © 2013-2017 Dennis A. Mook. All Rights Reserved. Feel free to point to this blog from your website with full attribution. Permission may be granted for commercial use. Please contact Mr. Mook to discuss permission to reproduce the blog posts and/or images.
Dennis,
ReplyDeleteI also tend to use zoom lenses at the extremes and it is the same regardless of the zoom range with different lenses and cameras. I often wonder if they could build better lenses with two focal lengths and skip the inbetween ones.
My use of higher ISOs has also gone up over the years, and that is for a lot of different cameras. I believe there are two reasons. One, I am photographing more events and have had to increase shutter speeds to stop subject motion. Since I am mostly already using the lenses wide open because of lighting, the only option is to increase ISO settings. Another thing is that camera processors and sensors have improved a great deal and higher ISO settings have gotten better and better and I don't have as many problems with noise.
John, thank you for your comment. I hope next year is your best ever!
DeleteWhen I shot with Leica rangefinders, I owned a Tri-Elmar. It had only three focal lengths—16mm, 18mm and 21mm. Nothing in between. Interesting lens and, again, I found myself using it either at 16 or 21mm! Go figure!
Also, I believe much of my high ISO imaging was because I shot some family events without flash indoors in a home that was relatively dark as well as some wildlife images where I wanted to keep my shutter speeds very high on very overcast days. Those events would account for a good portion of those images with high ISOs.