I would like to improve the quality of my zoom lens, so I’ve started looking around the web for recommendations on replacements. As you probably know, the options seem endless. I’m even considering a couple of primes instead of one zoom.
Background: I only have two lens; the EF-S 17-85mm kit lens that came with my Canon 40D and a Canon EF 80mm 1.8.
Naturally, one of my first questions is… what focal length should I get? The 17-85 is a good range, but do I really use the different lengths? Could I just get a nicer, wide prime and physically move in or out to compose?
That got me thinking… I wonder what focal length I use most of the time?
The answer:
I use my 50mm 25% of the time
I use my 17-85mm 75% of the time
Specifically,
17mm: 17% of the time (Yes, I double checked the math.)
50mm: 25% of the time
85mm: 14% of the time
Most of the remainder is wider than 50mm (47%)
How do I know?
Phil Harvey has created a really cool command line tool called ExifTool that can scan all your photos and export a list! From there, you can open in Excel and evaluate your data. It works on Windows or Mac.
Conclusion
I think I will look for a better lens in the 17-55 range. And also something longer than 85mm.
Phil’s Website: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/
Documentation: http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/exiftool_pod.html
How it works: I use Lightroom on a Mac to manage my photos, so I navigated to my Pictures directory in terminal:
cd /Users/(myusername)/Pictures
then ran this script
exiftool -r -T -filename -focallength -ext CR2 2008 > 2008.txt
That scans all files ending in “CR2″ in the 2008 directory (AND all subfolders) and exports them to a file containing the image name and the focal length. The file is named 2008.txt. I opened the txt file in Excel and created a pivot table to find the sum of each focal length (or you could use another method).
Feel free to comment if you want to try it, but need help.
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