# What's your most used focal length?



## nerwin

I was just curious what other people's most used focal length is. If you use Lightroom you can easily go into the library filter and you can add a column for focal length. Its really interesting to see what focal length you shoot at the most. 

For me, its 12mm and a close second is 35mm. 

Whats yours?


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## SnappingShark

35mm, then 50mm


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## Peeb

Wildlife: 300 (max on my longest zoom)
Walk-around:  all over the map (another zoom) with perhaps bias towards 105 (max zoom there too)
Landscape:  mostly in range of 30 to 60
Portrait:  50 to 105
Astrophotography:  the wider and faster the better.


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## SCraig

Somewhere between 17mm and 500mm


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## tirediron

85


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## Vtec44

50mm


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## chuasam

Portrait: 85mm or 200mm (I shoot with my small 85mm prime for long assignments and 200mm for the short intense ones)
Walk around: I use a point and shoot or my phone camera

Here's the list from my non-work catalogue




There's plenty of bias.
I used a D70s before I switched from iPhoto to Lightroom.
most of the photos from my iPhone4S and Nexus 6p never get downloaded to Lightroom.
Most of my shots from my D700 and D810 are in my work related catalogues (sorted by clients).


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## robbins.photo

123.41265452 mm

And nobody makes a prime lens for it.  Go figure.


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## nerwin

chuasam said:


> Portrait: 85mm or 200mm (I shoot with my small 85mm prime for long assignments and 200mm for the short intense ones)
> Walk around: I use a point and shoot or my phone camera
> 
> Here's the list from my non-work catalogue
> View attachment 122306
> There's plenty of bias.
> I used a D70s before I switched from iPhoto to Lightroom.
> most of the photos from my iPhone4S and Nexus 6p never get downloaded to Lightroom.
> Most of my shots from my D700 and D810 are in my work related catalogues (sorted by clients).



14-16682mm lens? Damn! I want one!!


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## jeffW

for me it's 24mm, wide but not too distorty (new word ) wide


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## nerwin

jeffW said:


> for me it's 24mm, wide but not too distorty (new word ) wide



What's new world wide? Just curious haha.


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## LARZRARZ

jeffW said:


> for me it's 24mm, wide but not too distorty (new word ) wide


I've wanted to get a 24mm for a while for more interesting portraits. Either that or a 35mm. Usually I use an 85mm, but I'm starting to get bored with the look.


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## jeffW

nerwin said:


> jeffW said:
> 
> 
> 
> for me it's 24mm, wide but not too distorty (new word ) wide
> 
> 
> 
> 
> What's new world wide? Just curious haha.
Click to expand...


new word, not world I just didn't want to spell distortion


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## chuasam

nerwin said:


> chuasam said:
> 
> 
> 
> Portrait: 85mm or 200mm (I shoot with my small 85mm prime for long assignments and 200mm for the short intense ones)
> Walk around: I use a point and shoot or my phone camera
> 
> Here's the list from my non-work catalogue
> View attachment 122306
> There's plenty of bias.
> I used a D70s before I switched from iPhoto to Lightroom.
> most of the photos from my iPhone4S and Nexus 6p never get downloaded to Lightroom.
> Most of my shots from my D700 and D810 are in my work related catalogues (sorted by clients).
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 14-16682mm lens? Damn! I want one!!
Click to expand...

Hahha goodness.  I have to go see which lens is giving such silly EXIF values. 

It is a pre-production 14-42 µ43rds lens on an Olympus EP-1


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## nerwin

jeffW said:


> nerwin said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> jeffW said:
> 
> 
> 
> for me it's 24mm, wide but not too distorty (new word ) wide
> 
> 
> 
> 
> What's new world wide? Just curious haha.
> 
> Click to expand...
> 
> 
> new word, not world I just didn't want to spell distortion
Click to expand...


Oh jeez. I'm blind.


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## tim.bennett

20mm(40mm equivalent) on my mft and  50mm on my nikon F65.


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## DarkShadow

600mm X 1.5 Crop is my everyday walk about.


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## Rye

Very interesting. The primes definitely rule the roost.

1: 420mm (300mm + 1.4x extender - a lot of bad/missed shots)
2: 100mm
3: 50mm

I always thought my 24-100 was the most useful but maybe I should dump my zooms and just use primes.


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## sscarmack

70-200 2.8, even though I haven't had one in about a year haha.

The Analytics Dashboard For Adobe Lightroom


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## jcdeboever

As of yesterday based on 9,123 images on digital, my overall average is 138 mm.
Portraits are at 86.4 mm
Street / candid are 35.3mm

I keep track of it in a spreadsheet. I noticed that I have a very low keeper rate. I need to improve in so many areas but my focus today is at the longer range 500mm


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## zombiesniper

500mm


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## 480sparky

I have not the ability to track such a metric, nor the inclination to do so.

So I'll guess and say 135mm.


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## baturn

500mm


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## dennybeall

About 65mm for me. But, only by a bit. I'm all over the place, from 10mm to 500mm, since I retired.


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## medic2230

Highest number at a given focal length was 70mm.


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## nerwin

Very interesting...mostly everyone is shooting more telephoto than wide.


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## Solarflare

I dont have lightroom but considering

(a) my first prime lens is 28mm
(b) my digital comrade is a 28mm (Ricoh GR)
(c) On my 16-35mm f4, the most used focals are clearly 28mm and 21mm

I would say its safe to assume my most used focal is 28mm.


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## TCampbell

I strongly prefer long focal lengths.  My most used focal length was 200mm (via my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens) and this was no surprise to me.  Subjects that might normally strike you as deserving a more "normal" focal length at a normal working distance... I tend to prefer to use a much longer focal length and back up a lot.  I really prefer the look of an image produced by long lens even when the subjects are not typical "long lens" subjects.


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## gckless

35mm for me, which makes sense since my 35mm prime was my sharpest lens for a long time and didn't leave the camera. That's followed by 18mm, and 17mm right behind that. I have a feeling that will be swinging towards 200mm+ by the end of the year though.


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## imagemaker46

300mm-400mm


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## chuasam

nerwin said:


> Very interesting...mostly everyone is shooting more telephoto than wide.


because if I only wanted wide angles, I would stick to using my cellphone camera.


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## PropilotBW

40mm.  

I leave my Olympus 12-40mm on my camera almost all the time.  Just so happens, I enjoy zooming all the way in!


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## chuasam

PropilotBW said:


> 40mm.
> 
> I leave my Olympus 12-40mm on my camera almost all the time.  Just so happens, I enjoy zooming all the way in!


That should count as an 80mm for purpose of Polling.


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## PropilotBW

chuasam said:


> PropilotBW said:
> 
> 
> 
> 40mm.
> 
> I leave my Olympus 12-40mm on my camera almost all the time.  Just so happens, I enjoy zooming all the way in!
> 
> 
> 
> That should count as an 80mm for purpose of Polling.
Click to expand...


Perhaps


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## Coreysaysyo

30mm - 35mm Is the best for me. Just what I am used to when shooting. 

I know how close or far I need to be 

Although I guess it is a bit farther really, I shoot with ASP-C so the crop factor really makes it about 50mm.


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## fmw

60mm simply because that is the lens I use for product photography and I do product photography every day.


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## randymckown

depends .. in my portrait collection is going to be a toss between two lenses .. 85mm and 105mm. My wildlife collection will lean more to 600mm. Other libraries will be a crazy mix of everything.


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## nzmacro

Now days would be approx 90% with 500mm and 9% with 800mm, 1% with 300mm. Anything else is far too wide.

Danny.


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## webestang64

When shooting my Pentax 35mm film cameras I'd say I use the 50mm and 135mm the most. My Canon A2E the 35-105mm. My 645 camera the 80mm gets the most use.


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