Sorry Scott, but the title of your article and the fact that you don’t mention that 24-70mm f2.8 lenses (by Canon, Nikon, Sony, Carl-Zeiss…) are of much higher quality (glass, chromatic aberration, sharpness, speed, materials, build…) than their cheaper siblings definitely could make some people with less experience in what makes a great lens great, take the wrong decision. Years ago, when I started to dedicate myself to fine art photography with a close-to-zilch budget, I bought a plethora of cheaper lenses, only realising afterwards that the money buying me six lenses that weren’t sharp enough, had horrible chromatic aberrations, were terribly slow when autofocusing, and had no decent coated glass inside them, could well have sufficed to get me two great and virtually perfect f2.8 lenses (24-70 and 70-200mm). I actually lost a lot of money buying all the cheap glass, having to sell it for peanuts only a couple of years later to help me buy what I should have bought in the first place: f2.8 lenses. Even if they are (almost) never used at f2.8, their “soft spot” is at a far larger opening than any 4.5 or 5.6 zoom lens out there. Numbers don’t always tell the truth… not even in Lightroom.

This is a great tutorial on using Lightroom to uncover some interesting statistics on how we use our lenses. I checked the last 5 years’ usage for my 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens and I found that I shoot at f/8.0 about 40% of the time, f/2.8 only 7% of the time, and f/6.3 16% of the time. I don’t think I need a faster lens than that!

Hi, Mike: I think just looking at these stats is fascinating – thank you for sharing how you used it. 🙂

Hi, Eric: That’s a prefect way to use it!!! Thanks for sharing that (I wish I had that example when I was writing this). 🙂

No, I’m teaching a Lightroom technique. Oy.