Focal Lengths and usage

You know most photographers are always looking to fill various gaps in their lens collection. For quite a while, my lenses cover 16-35mm and 70-200mm. While there is a perceived gap between 35mm to 70mm, it didn’t bother me much. Since two years ago when I bought myself the 24-105 as a birthday present, it became somewhat my “wide” lens since it had a stabilizer and of course, my wife is now using my 16-35 most of the time. Anyways, I decided to analyze about 1000-plus frames shot in Cameron Highlands last month. The surprising result is that I mostly use either end of the lenses I have. If you look at the chart below (or click here for the larger version), you’ll see spikes at the 24, 70, 105 and 200mm focal lengths. Blue represents my 24-105 and red is my 70-200. I do wonder now if this is quite representative of most photographers since I read in a forum that quite a few members also said they mostly used either ends of their zoom lenses. Interesting-eh?

I’ll go home and do a more proper analysis of perhaps this year’s shots or the average wedding for example and see if I can dig up more interesting facts… and if I have time, I’ll post a simple how-to to help you plot your own graph.