How do you select a focal length for your first prime lens?

Hi every­one, my name is Paul, this is Expo­sure Ther­a­py, and in this video, I’ll demon­strate how Adobe Light­room Clas­sic can help you select your next prime lens.

Most of the stu­dents that attend my pho­tog­ra­phy work­shops bring gear pur­chased as part of a bun­dle or kit mar­ket­ed towards begin­ners. The kits typ­i­cal­ly include a basic DSLR or mir­ror­less cam­era, and a zoom lens with an 18–55 or 16–50 mm focal length, which varies depend­ing on the cam­era make. Some kits include a 75–300 mm lens for greater reach, but these are rar­er. 

When the work­shops tran­si­tion to the top­ic of the aper­ture and depth of field, some stu­dents real­ize that their basic zoom lens­es can’t achieve the shal­low depth of field aes­thet­ic they desire. This is fol­lowed by requests for me to rec­om­mend a large-aper­ture prime lens, which inevitably leads to a dis­cus­sion about how to choose a use­ful focal length. And so I ask prob­ing ques­tions about their pre­ferred sub­ject mat­ter, style, work­ing dis­tance, bud­get, etc., all in an attempt to glean the ide­al focal length for each stu­dent. 

This line of inquiry is com­mon, but it’s also prob­lem­at­ic because it assumes begin­ners can pro­vide accu­rate answers to ques­tions and con­cepts they’ve like­ly nev­er care­ful­ly con­sid­ered up to this point. 

Is there a bet­ter way? There is, but I’ll need access to your com­put­er.

Adobe Lightroom Classic can help you determine your next prime lens.

If you take every pic­ture a pho­tog­ra­ph­er has shot on a zoom lens and sort the results by the focal lengths used, you’ll find an uneven dis­tri­b­u­tion of images among them: some will have a greater share of the total num­ber of pic­tures than oth­ers. Bar­ring a few excep­tions, I pro­pose that the focal length with the great­est share of the total—the plurality—is the ide­al focal length for that photographer’s next prime lens. 

How do you do this?

Your cam­era embeds infor­ma­tion about itself into every pho­to it saves. This is known as meta­da­ta. Exam­ples of this info include the time and date of cap­ture, the camera’s make and mod­el, and, cru­cial­ly, the set focal length of a zoom lens. This is true for vir­tu­al­ly every mod­ern DSLR, mir­ror­less, and point-and-shoot cam­era.

Adobe Light­room Classic—emphasis on the Clas­sic, as this can’t be done in their sim­pli­fied version—has a func­tion that lets you fil­ter your entire entire cat­a­logue, or a selec­tion of pho­tos, by a vari­ety of meta­da­ta attrib­ut­es, includ­ing by set focal length. When you acti­vate the focal length attribute, the appli­ca­tion dis­plays a list of every focal length you’ve used to take the select­ed images, along with the total num­ber of pho­tos shot using those focal lengths. My the­o­ry is that focal lengths with a com­par­a­tive­ly larg­er share of pho­tos are evi­dence of a pref­er­ence and can serve as a great start­ing point for pick­ing your next no-regrets prime lens. 

Now I’ll demon­strate the process.

[Demon­stra­tion in video]

Analysis and limitation

The first and most obvi­ous lim­i­ta­tion of this method is that it requires Adobe Light­room Clas­sic. The so-called mod­ern­ized ver­sion of Adobe Light­room, the one avail­able on both desk­top and mobile plat­forms, can’t fil­ter meta­da­ta by lens type or focal length. (On a side note: I firm­ly rec­om­mend Light­room Clas­sic over Light­room not-clas­sic.) I’ve also con­firmed that both Apple Pho­tos and Google Pho­tos don’t allow fil­ter­ing pic­tures by set focal length, despite their abil­i­ty to read and dis­play the data in ques­tion. I can’t com­ment about per­form­ing this type of analy­sis using oth­er apps, such as Cap­ture One Pro, Pho­to Mechan­ic, etc., sim­ply because I nei­ther own nor use them. So sor­ry.

Sec­ond­ly, it’s impor­tant to under­stand that both the upper and low­er lim­its of your zoom’s focal length range can own a greater share of the dis­tri­b­u­tion. This isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly because you pre­fer these focal lengths, but more so because they’re the hard lim­it of the lens. For exam­ple, if my lens tops out at 55 mm, but I want a big­ger ren­di­tion of my sub­ject, I’m going to set­tle on 55 mm despite want­i­ng more. 

Last­ly, this analy­sis is lim­it­ed to the focal length range of your exist­ing zoom lens­es. How­ev­er, since the point of this method is to guide you towards a pre­ferred focal length from among those that you use, this lim­i­ta­tion is large­ly moot. I firm­ly believe that it’s more prac­ti­cal for begin­ners to expand their col­lec­tion of zoom lens­es before com­mit­ting to fixed-focal length prime lens­es. The ulti­mate point of this exer­cise is to engage in due dili­gence and pho­to­graph­ic intro­spec­tion so that you can avoid buyer’s remorse. 

Conclusion

And there you have it, an easy way to use Adobe Light­room Clas­sic to help you choose your next prime lens based on the focal lengths you use most often. If you have requests for future top­ics, let me know in the com­ments, and I’ll address them in future videos. In the mean­time, you can learn more about pho­tog­ra­phy on ExposureTherapy.ca. See you next time.