We’re done with 2017 and that marks the end of my 3rd year working as a photographer!
For those who were wondering this morning “Hey, is Alex Tran a nerd?”, well boy do I have the answer for you with a few new photography stats. I did this for the first time two years ago, visualizing my wedding photography stats (back when I did weddings).
Now for this year, I’ve only calculated a few things I was most curious about. And before we start let me just say that I’m fully aware that I may be the only person on Earth interested by these numbers.
First, my lens use. With a few more lenses in my arsenal, and a steady shift towards shooting more mirrorless cameras, I was interested in seeing how I used my different lenses. Here’s the distribution:
It’s almost a tie between my top two lenses (the 16mm & 23mm Fuji lenses).
I knew that I used those lenses a lot, but I didn’t think they'd represent a whopping 44.9% of all shots taken. My use goes down the more telephoto the lenses become, until I get to the Nikon 85mm 1.8 lens, which has some heavy use since it’s my main headshot lens.
I’m also happy to say that I’m officially more of a mirrorless shooter now (64.4%, vs. 35.6% DSLR).
Alright tech talk is over, let’s head down to some big numbers down here.
I took 79,118 photos in 2017. That is a lot. Jeez I hope at least a few of them were good.
It’s a pretty big jump from last year, when I shot 52,344. This number alone doesn’t tell me much—other than that I’ll have to replace my camera shutters soon—but it'll be interesting to see this over the years.
And then the 544 is really interesting to me.
That’s the number of people I’ve taken portraits of.
I excluded group photos, people I photographed during events, and personal lifestyle photos.
These are 544 different people who stood across from me to be photographed by me.
These people ranged from close friends of mine, to people I’ll likely never see again. There were people who paid me to photograph them, people I asked to photograph, and even people who hated being there the entire time, but had to since they were forced by their employer. That’s 544 connections, brief or long, but 544 nonetheless. 544 faces etched in my memory. It’s fun to think about.
544 souls captured.
Just kidding, I always give them back.
And then the last bit is just my capture distribution across months.
Quiet months flanking the New Year, which is great since I'm 100% in relaxing mode right now. Lowest is 2,234 photos in January, and highest is 12,752 in August (travel & weddings!).
Here's to a 2018 with better photos and a lot more faces to photograph!