I recently became infected with CCD mania, and among others, got myself a Fujifilm S100FS bridge camera from 2008. It’s my millionth retro camera acquisition lately, but this was the first time I took it as the main camera to a holiday. It sports a 28-400mm equivalent lens, and I wanted to check my preconception about my own photographic style: I thought of myself as a telephoto guy, who likes to zoom out and rely heavily on perspective compression. Consequently I expected the focal lenght histogram to lean towards the long end. Little did I know! The following charts were created with a little program called ExposurePlot, can be grabbed from http://www.vandel.nl/
The long end is clearly a significant focal length here, but most of the action happened in the standard-short tele range, and the widest setting is through the roof! We took a few selfies (yes, with a chunky DSLR-like body), but definitely not that many. Browsing through the photos, they seem to cover the candid photos I took of my girlfriend and a good amount of cityscapes (Mostar, Sarajevo).
Up next, we took a hike last year and I had an APS-C kit including three lenses: 10-20mm, 18-55mm kit, and 55-300mm telephoto.
Much more like it, at least close to how I think I’m taking photographs: the kit lens maxed out, all the time, which gave me passable portraits even at f/5.6 (see the featured photo).
So what happens if I replace that 18-55mm with Nikon’s (somewhat overrated) 18-140mm lens? Similar scenario about ten months later, scenic hike, no wide lens this time, but a 18-140mm accompanied by a 70-300mm which replaced the softish 55-300mm in my bag. I also had my beloved 35mm f/1.8 with me.
Apparently I’m gravitating towards 110mm for portraits which I have plenty in this album. I extensively use the tele end, but have again numerous wide angle shots. My style changed a fair bit, I’m taking more landscapes now on each hike. The spike at 50mm reflects the shots taken with the 35mm f/1.8 lens. There are zero pics between the tele end of the 18-140mm lens and the 70-300mm maxed out: we actually spotted a chamois then I left it on for birding: a sparrow was the best I got. Other than that it layed around in my camera bag, so I was apparently happy with 210mm equiv even for close-ups.
Final scenario: I’m on my own, exploring a city. No portraits of a girlfriend standing by, just the streets. It was in Mumbai, and I was quite fascinated with people. Had only one lens on camera all-day: the Panasonic 14-140mm on a GX9 body.
Wow! I really expected this one to be evenly spread in the 40-80 range, 40mm for contextual street photos, and up to 80mm when people had the emphasis. Apparently wide angle cityscapes were the most predominant, and again, there’s a spike at the tele end for detail shots. It’s quite similar to the Bosnian-Croatian trip we took recently (first histogram).
Overall it’s fair to say that my expectation was not far off from reality, but I was surprised to see so many wide shots. Wide angle is not something I’m visually attracted to, but it’s extremely convenient to twist it all out, and have some more stuff packed into your frame – at least that’s what statistics say.
I had an additional motivational factor with the above experiment: I wanted to see what would I lose if I switched to full frame. I’ve been eyeballing the Nikon 24-120mm f/4 for a while, which can be had with a D600 under 700 EUR second hand. Based on the above histograms, I could probably adjust to it, but would definitely miss that long end.