UPDATE 9/2019: The move from Squarespace to WordPress broke a few things. In this particular instance, the pretty graphs that Squarespace provides. I’m working on a solution, but until then, this post will not make a lot of sense. 🙂

It’s that time of year again. Time to get geeky with the numbers from 2018.

If you haven’t checked out the 2017 in Photos post, take a peek at it.

The Lightroom Dashboard is a great place to get a quick look at your stats, but I found that I prefer to go through my Lightroom library myself and grab numbers from the Metadata Filter panel.

This year, I decided to go back and grab stats from 2008 on so I could compare, but let’s look at 2018 first.

Other 2018 Stats

I’m actually kind of surprised at the pretty equal lens usage this year. Even without the rental lens in the results, the numbers are similar. The 2017 numbers weren’t even close to being equal.

I’m glad the Sony a7 II is still ahead of my iPhone in number of photos taken. I’m always afraid that one of these years I’ll end up shooting more with my phone than I do with a real camera.

February’s numbers are high because of a model shoot, a courthouse shoot, and a timelapse. I shot a wedding in July, so that bumped the shutter count. October was another wedding.

Sidenote: I’m not a wedding photographer. The one I shot in October will be the last one I ever shoot. It’s nothing personal—both weddings I shot this year were beautiful, and the people were awesome—but the sheer volume of photos sucks all the fun out of photography for me. I tip my hats to the real wedding photographers who process thousands of photos after every event. I think I’ll stick to models and maybe some landscapes.

The one stat I think I’ll start looking into is film. I didn’t do much film shooting in 2018, but I plan to in 2019.

The Last Ten Years

Now lets dive into some comparisons to previous years…

I go in phases with black and white photography. Lightroom lets me filter by treatment—black and white or color—so these numbers really only show images I’ve set to black and white in Lightroom. Photos that were shot as JPGs in black and white mode on the camera itself don’t show up in the results (but there really aren’t many of them—I prefer to shoot in RAW.) I’m finding that I enjoy black and white more and more as time goes on.

There really doesn’t seem to be a trend with how many shots I take in a year. And there’s the quality over quantity argument, so I’m not sure this data is even relevant. Then again, there’s something to be said about just getting out and shooting something.

CAMERAS

I tend to shoot with a mixture of DSLR (or full-frame mirrorless since I switched to Sony,) point and shoot, and phone cameras. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked at what I shot with over the past ten years.

DSLR/Full-Frame Mirrorless

I seem to have a three year cycle here.

2008-2010: Canon 40D
2011-2013: Canon 7D
2014-2016: Canon 5D Mk III
2017-2018: Sony a7 II

Point and Shoot/Crop-sensor Mirrorless

There doesn’t appear to be a regular cycle here. Since they tend to be cheaper, I buy a new little camera when I see one I like.

2008: Canon PowerShot SD630
2009-2012: Canon PowerShot SD780 IS
2013-2015: Canon EOS M
2016-2017: Canon EOS M3
2018: Sony DSC-HX99

Phones

This one is pretty predictable now that I swap out iPhones every year, but 2010 saw a glitch in the matrix.

2008-2009: iPhone 3G
2010: HTC Hero
2011-2015: Starting with the iPhone 4, upgraded every year and ended on the iPhone 6
2016-2018: The “Plus” version of the iPhone got dual cameras, so starting with the 6s Plus, I’ve been sticking to them up to the 8 Plus.

Highlights

See you in 2019!

Diego and I wish you Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year. Enjoy time with family, friends, and good food and beer and wine.

If you have a camera, get out and shoot!