It’s time to buy a new lens, but you have no idea what lens best suits your shooting style. This makes the already difficult decision of picking out a lens a lot tougher. I have gone through this decision twice already and both times I let my own photos decide on which lens would be best for me. Now you may be asking yourself, how can the photos I take give me the information I need when purchasing a lens? Now obviously you can’t ask the photos directly because, well they just won’t answer you. The trick is extracting the information from the images to help you decide on this very important purchase.

Every picture you take has TONS of information stored in it, such as date, camera, ISO, aperture, shutter speed, etc… The picture also contains the focal length of the lens when the shot was taken. This information can be extremely valuable when it comes time to purchase another lens. Lightroom will display this information to you in the EXIF metadata in the Library Module, but you cannot sort the pictures by it. Because of this missing feature in Lightroom, we need to use another piece to help us with our decision.

Now obviously you can’t ask the photos directly because, well they just won’t answer you…

This piece of software is freeware and is something that should be included in Lightroom by default, but unfortunately it’s not. We are now going to download and install ImageReporter by Marc Rockhind. Windows users can click here for the software and Mac users can click here for the software. ImageReporter will take your Lightroom Catalog, analyze ALL the metadata stored in the images and present in a way that we can view it statistically. When presented in this way, the purchasing decision becomes 100x easier and much more justified.

ImageReporter is a very easy piece of software to use and the menus and options are extremely straight forward. The first step is going to be choosing the catalog containing the images we want to analyze. The first step is the select the Lightroom Catalog – select Change and then navigate to your Lightroom Catalog, which will end with the .lrcat file extension. As you can see my Lightroom Catalog path is “F:\archive\catalog\2009\cat_2009_daily\cat_2009_daily.lrcat” so that is where I navigate to.

Then you can select any filters that you would like such as Image Type (DNG, TIFF, JPG, etc.), Rating (stars in Lightroom) and Capture Time (how recent the image was taken). You can also choose to only include images “Picked” or in your “Quick Collection” in that catalog. In the screenshot below you can see I chose to run the report on DNG’s taken in the last 90 days with a “pick” flag and a rating of 4 or more stars. Click the [b]Report[/b] button to process your report. Note that if you have A LOT of images in your Lightroom Catalog that this can take a while.

The report will appear in the gray box at the bottom of the window and the part we are most concerned with is the “Count by Focal Length” section of the results. This information will tell you which focal lengths you primarily shoot at and this information is vital to choosing the new lens. Based on this information you can see if you are shooting a lot at the longer focal lengths or more towards the wider end of the lens. If, for example, you are using the Canon 18-55 “kit lens” and you notice that most of your pictures are taken at 55mm it might be time to upgrade to a zoom lens with a longer focal length. If you see that a lot of your photos are taken at 18mm it might be time to upgrade to a wide angle lens.

My report at the bottom indicates that most of my shots are at the wider end of the focal range, which is why I ended up buying my Sigma 10-20 lens over a zoom lens as my first upgrade lens. My report can be seen below so you can see how I analyzed my focal lengths. You may notice that a majority of my shots are taken at 50mm and that is because of my 50mm f/1.8 lens that I shoot with a lot since it is really good in low light. Based on my latest report and a custom one I did on my 18-55mm lens use I decided that my next lens should be a replacement for the 18-55mm. For that reason I decided to upgrade to the Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 lens so I got a bit more focal length and a MUCH more wide open aperture.

I hope that this information can help you when it comes time to purchase that next lens. If you have any other tips or tricks with regards to lens purchasing please feel free to leave them in the comments.

Stigy