Camera Nrrdery

For fun: You can see that I use my fixed 50mm and 21mm lenses far more than anything else I've got.

I use Adobe's Lightroom to manage my RAW photos. It's a wonderful, splendid tool. It provides a handy metadata browser of your photo library, and includes the ability to browse by lens. Recently James Duncan Davidson mentioned being interested in plotting his use of various focal lengths, and commenters responded with a number of solutions. Since Lightroom uses a SQLite database for its library, tools like SQLite Browser can be used to scan through the database file itself. This is pretty slick all by itself, but I thought I'd put together a quick tool to automate the extraction and generation of this data. To do that, I use sqlite3 from the command line to dump the metadata table to a file, and then a short bit of R code finds the focal lengths and builds the histogram.

I wrote up some additional details over at my lacking-content-lately blog.