Photo Statistics: Aggregating EXIF data to see how I shoot photos

Digital cameras have revolutionized the field of photography not only by getting rid of film — digital formats allow for storing of information about an image along with the associated image data. This information is known as EXIF data, and contains values such as time and date, shutter speed and aperture, and even geographic location.

I decided to look at what this kind of data looks like when aggregated together. Here is a bubble plot of focal length (zoom) when compared to aperture (how “open” a lens is)

Of all possible lens configurations, the most common one is a 50mm focal length at f/1.8 aperture, taken with the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 “nifty fifty” lens. This is not really surprising, since I love how sharp the images come out, and the wide open aperture lets you take images with a small depth of field and great bokeh (blurring); it’s also one of the cheapest lenses out there, at just over $100! Here’s an example of one of these 50mm f/1.8 shots:

Looking at the low-focal length area of the chart leads to some interesting conclusions:

Here is the distribution of what focal lengths I use:

Again, you can see the gap in images between 55mm and 75mm because I don’t own any lenses there. It’s interesting to note that I mostly use lenses at their extrema: the 18-55 lens is mostly used at 18 or at 55, as with the 75-300 lens.

Obviously, I’m not the first person to look at EXIF data all together. Michael Hseuh of Berkeley has written a technical report about this (available here). He includes an interesting semantic twist to EXIF data by looking at photos pulled from flickr, where photos are also tagged with various categories. Thus, he is able to look at what kind of settings people use to take photos of particular things, like the Aurora Borealis or underwater.

It would be interesting to see how different photographers use different realms of the visual / optic range. For me, this information is useful since it lets me know that buying a lens with a wide aperture would be worth it, because most of the photos I take are with a wide aperture. Also, I tend to take landscape photos (wide zoom), so buying telephoto lenses probably isn’t worth it for me.