Bull muskox on the windy, snow covered tundra of the arctic north slope, Alaska. Canon 1Ds Mark III, 500mm f/4L IS, 1/500 sec. @ f/8, ISO 400. The snow is quite hard and wind packed, which enables the feet of the animal to be seen, this is not an easily achieved task with muskoxen. I was traveling in my vehicle, so I was able to hike that day with my 500 mounted on my tripod and a waist belt with another lens or two. The 500 is one of my all time favorite lenses but sometimes the size and weight are factors that make me leave it behind on some trips. I don't use it just for wildlife, but find it useful for isolating subjects, either macro or telephoto compression landscapes.
Selecting cameras and lenses for a photo trip usually takes me longer than anticipated. If I’m working from my car, that’s a different story, since I can take everything I need, and pick and choose a subset of lenses or camera’s based on the day or moment’s activity. I own a lot of Canon lenses, but can’t realistically take them all on one trip, and secondly, some have specific applications. For example, I own the 100-400 f/5.6L IS, the 400 5.6L (non IS) and the 400 f/4L DO IS. I sometimes take the 100-400 for versatility, or I’ll take the 400 DO when I want the option of using a 1.4x and travel light, or I’ll take the 400 5.6 if I need a smaller and lightweight lens for backpacking. This same sequence is repeated with a few other lens configurations. Of course I have favorite lenses, and some I prefer for obvious reasons of quality and optical excellence, but sometimes slight compromises are made for flexibility and function.
I’m not a real prolific shooter when compared to some of my colleagues. And since I favor landscapes, I tend to shoot less volume than when shooting wildlife and moving subjects. In 2009, I kept 5,511 photos in my stock library. These are the edited down files I saved and I don’t know how many I deleted or moved to outtakes, but it was a lot more than what I kept! Here is the breakdown of the cameras and lenses I used and how many shots for each.
2009: 5511 Photos
CAMERAS
- EOS 5D Mark II – 1487
- EOS 7D – 86
- EOS 1D Mark III – 68
- EOS 1Ds Mark III – 3867
LENSES
- 16-35 f/2.8L II – 841
- 24-70 f/2.8L – 87
- 24-105 f/4L – 1718
- 24 f/1.4L II – 81
- 70-200 f/2.8L IS – 713
- 70-200 f/4L IS – 21
- 100-400 f/5.6L IS – 726
- 100 f/2.8 Macro – 21
- 300 f/2.8L IS – 221
- 400 f/5.6L – 97
- 500 f/4L IS – 915
- 300 with w/1.4x
- 17 w/2x
2008: 4465 Photos
CAMERAS
- EOS 5D Mark II – 4
- EOS 1D Mark III – 74
- EOS 1Ds Mark III – 4385
LENSES
- 16-35 f/2.8L II – 319
- 24-70 f/2.8L – 18
- 24-105 f/4L – 1525
- 24 f/1.4L – 46
- 24 f/3.5L TS – 7
- 70-200 f/2.8L IS – 381
- 70-200 f/4L IS – 21
- 70-300 f/5.6L DO – 72 (This lens was stolen and I did not replace it, therefore not used in 2009)
- 100-400 f/5.6L IS – 643
- 100 f/2.8 Macro – 19
- 300 f/2.8L IS – 186
- 400 f/5.6L – 67
- 12 w/1.4x
- 500 f/4L IS – 915
- 336 with w/1.4x
- 54 w/2x
Patrick, I see your distribution is biased toward the 1DsIII and 5DII, 16-35, 24-105 and 500. That is similar to my own experience. Great idea posting these numbers, an interesting read.
Yes, the sIII and the 5dII win out. The 5d for traveling light. The wide and mid range zooms are so flexible that I find myself gravitating towards them most often. The 500 rocks but its a beast. The current version of the 100-400 that I own is excellent in ways I’ve been skeptical of with others that I’ve owned. That lens delivers versatility and compositional control.
This is great! Besides being solid information and useful, I can now refer all the people to this blog post who ask me “What camera and lenses…..” Cool use of empirical data too. Did you have fields set up to organize the exif data in a way you could pull any and all of it easily?
Troy, I just added data from 2008 just for grins. I gathered the info from Lightroom Metadata, just a quick list to make, although not exported in any fancy way. A table would be nice.
This is a very useful compilation. “2008…•EOS 5D Mark II – 4” Only 4? 🙂 I did a similar count count on your 2010 calendar just for fun, and found that the 500 and the 24-105 held the majority of the pages.
What I’ve wished for is that your stock photos would be keyworded by the equipment you used, so I could search for a certain lens/body and all of the photos taken with that lens would show up. I realize that rekeywording 30k photos would be a significant undertaking, but it is an idea for when you upload photos in the future.
Eli,
That is not that difficult to employ actually. There is functionality to embed exif data, or import it, but I don’t have the script for that set up on my site. It would be nice in some ways, although mostly for us photo geeks and not photo buyers.
Yes, it isn’t really anything relevant to the buyers. Anyway, most of your photo trips go through the blog, which has the tech specs on it. I don’t recall seeing any shots from the past year taken with the 300mm f/2.8, though.