Every so often my mind goes off and attempts to convince me into purchasing some new equipment, such as a camera bag, lens, tripod, when I don’t really need to. “Psssst, Hey Monte! Did you ever think of this?” This whispering voice tells me I don’t use that lens enough, so sell it and buy this one. Or maybe it’s suggesting I don’t need that fast a lens and this slower lens would be just fine or just the opposite, buy the fast lens. I’ve even heard it tell me the lens is getting old, knowing that after five years it works just fine. The latest whispering has been to look at the Nikon 85mm f3.5 VR macro lens. I already have a Nikon 85mm f1.8 and a Sigma 105mm f2.8 macro. The whispering is suggesting I could use this one lens in place of two. Do you hear a whisper?

And then, I remembered that in Lightroom 3 we can filter images by metadata so I decided to see what I could find. What lens do I use the most? What focal length is my most used? What aperture do I gravitate towards? Not sure if anyone has used the metadata filtering before but I found some very interesting information about my lens choices.

• I bought the 35mm f1.8 in early 2009. It has become my go-to lens with 50% of my images taken with it since I purchase it. It has been used almost exclusively for street work and on my travels due to it’s smaller size.

• The 85mm f1.8 lens was purchased for portraits about four years ago. Out of 25,000 images in my archives I have 91 images using that lens. So, that asks the question, do I need it? So, I could sell it and use the money to attend a workshop and maybe improve on the photographers skills? 🙂

• I’ve had the Sigma 105mm f2.8 macro for several years now. I find it focuses slow and has a tendency to wander, so I use it almost exclusively in manual focus. I’m pleased with the images taken with it and have not regretted purchasing it. But the interesting fact I discovered about my use of this lens is that I seldom use it at it’s fastest aperture, only 13% are in the range of f2.8 to f3.5. So, maybe the new Nikon is not such a bad idea. 🙂

• I’ve owned my Nikon 18-200mm f4.0-5.6 VR lens for at least four years. It has been my primary lens prior to purchasing the 35mm which I use almost exclusively. I’ve discovered 10% of my images were shot at 18mm and about 14% at 200mm. The rest of the focal range usage was spread evenly between 35-120mm with the largest number between 50-105mm. My aperture of choice, and also due to the limitations of the lens, was between f5.6 to f8.0. I consistently shot between 1/60 to 1/160 of a second with this lens. This data scared me because of the new Nikon 24-120mm f4.0 VR lens Nikon just announced. There’s that whisper again, “Pssst, Monte, let’s talk.”

So, what are my conclusions? Well, Lightroom 3 is awesome. It allows me to see so much information about my photography equipment and how I use it. I was only guessing at how I used my equipment but with Lightroom and metadata I now know  more about how I use my lenses. Anyway it was an interesting exercise, so I bought a lotto ticket. 🙂