Quantitative Analysis of My Photographic Style

I'm starting to look for a new camera. I'm moving from an advanced point-and-shoot to a basic DSLR. Choosing a body is hard enough. But, what about lenses? The answer different for everyone. It depends upon your style. Do you shoot landscapes, portraits, wildlife, or macro? I currently have a Canon S3 IS super-zoom which does fairly well at any of these, but mostly I like landscapes. Presumably I should be using wider angle settings. I'm now looking at ultra-wide zooms, but does my picture taking history show that this is the range of focal lengths that I use  would use most?

First I gathered all the photos I took with my S3 on a 2010 trip to Japan. Using ExifTool, I extracted the focal length setting from every photo I took with that camera.  Alternatively I might have decided to analyze only my favorite photos, but I decided to look at the larger data set. On my computer, I opened a terminal and moved to the folder containing the photos to be analyzed. It this case the photos were on a SAMBA file server. In Linux, the SAMBA path can be pretty long. I learned that you can just type "cd " in the terminal, then drag the network photos folder in the Nemo file browser to the text window to complete the command with the full network address. From there, I typed the following command to get a listing of the the focal lengths of all photo files.

 exiftool -exif:focallength ./ > out.txt

 Next I used GREP to eliminate the file names.

 grep Focal out.txt > test.txt

This can be done in one step by piping commands, of course. The file was imported and parsed into LibreOffice Calc such that I had only a list of focal lengths. Since the S3 has a 1/6 size sensor I had to multiply all the focal lengths by 6 to get the 35 mm equivalent. Next I needed to break the data into categories. Since focal length is logarithmic, I made 11 categories by starting with the minimum value and multiplying by 1.333. I didn't bother with Sturges' Rule or the Rice Rule. I just thought ten categories would be about right. After applying the frequency function to the data, I created the following chart.

It looks like over half my photos were taken at the maximum wide angle setting. The next most used setting was maximum telephoto. There's as slight increase in the middle, around 100 mm. One thing to be aware of is that many point-and-shoot cameras go to maximum wide when first powered on. This may have the potential to skew data.

What did I learn? Most of my pictures are taken at maximum wide angle. This means an ultra wide angle zoom might be most useful for me.

So how fast should the lens be? Can I categorize lighting conditions? Is there a single number that characterizes the brightness of the most commonly photographed scenes? The number would have to be some combination of shutter speed, aperture, ISO and sensor size. And that's a task for some other day.