What Metadata Reveals the Photographer Inside

Using the metadata filters on your photograph library can tell you a lot about the type of shooter you are and the subjects you tend to prefer.

The amazing feature about metadata and programs which wrangle metadata is that they allow for analysis in minutia of your shooting habits. It so happens, I am a data and statistics freak. Nothing pleases me more than to dive into analysis and reflection on the numbers and patterns behind the images.  That is why I used Lightroom™ to take a retrospective walk down the memory lane beyond the sign post marked 2009.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 28,000 shutters were fired by me in 2009.  A detailed analysis using metadata filters told me that I had about 88 images which I considered to be the cream of the crop. 88 images I would consider printing and offering for sale as fine-art.

Of those 88 images, over half (54) were taken with just 1 of the 5 cameras used during the year. Of those 54, 30 of them were taken with a particular lens. 1 out of 3 of the images, I deemed worthy, were taken with a single camera/lens combination.

The combination was a full-frame sensor Canon 5D and a 17-40 F4L Canon Lens. Apparently, I am a full-frame, wide-angle shooter. I really wasn’t surprised by this. I knew, as a landscape shooter at-heart,  that I favored wide and by extension, favored full-frame.  Not all of my subjects ended up being landscapes however.

Some of the images had people and structures in them. Some of them were flash and some were natural light. Looking at the larger picture, pardon the pun, if you take a gander at the 19455 images which didn’t get deleted from the catalog, the pattern falls apart. Whereas 1/3 of my favs were from the 5D/17-40 combo, only 1/6 images was captured that way.  Part of that is due to several assignments that were shot, by necessity, with a different camera/lens combo (like a conference shot entirely with a 5D/70-200) or this year’s crop of Senior Portraits, again shot with a different combo.  When I gear up, I tend to mount the wide-angle zoom on the 5D and a long lens on one of my crop-sensor cameras before I head out.

Upon further reflection and refraction, maybe it says more about what I like than what I shoot. I shoot many combos but tend to like the wide view.

Rikk Flohr © 2009

del.icio.us Tags: metadata,analysis,wide-angle,full-frame,Lightroom,retrospective