I have quite a few lenses, but some I like more than others – and some I use more than others. But they are not the same.
Lightroom doesn’t lie. And Lightroom says that these are my top 15 lenses:
# | Lens | Shots | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
1 | 35,044 | The workhorse over them all! Like a 24-70mm, but for DX. | |
2 | 19,032 | Just an unavoidable lens for telephoto work. | |
3 | 16,089 | A true favorite of mine. DX only, but still a great lens with great image quality and colors. | |
4 | 8,071 | My first real Nikon DSLR-lens – and for a long time the only one. Hence the large number of pictures. I actually didn’t like the lens much, and have since sold it. | |
5 | 7,278 | Super-wide, rectilinear, and I love it. | |
6 | 5,788 | A DX macro that just does its job. | |
7 | 5,550 | Bright and wide - and full-frame too. | |
8 | 5,172 | Another DX-macro. I shoot a lot of macro, and most of my macro lenses get used. | |
9 | 4,640 | A classic for portraits and short telephoto work. This is the old D-model. I now also have the newer G-model. | |
10 | 3,941 | For a long time the only macro I had. I had the same lens for my Minolta bodies. | |
11 | 3,308 | A very bright normal lens. Great on DX as well as full-frame. | |
12 | 2,920 | A very good lens. Bright, sharp, solid. I’m surprised I haven’t used it more. | |
13 | 2,547 | A nifty little DX lens, which I really like, but actually rarely use. | |
14 | 1,700 | DX, bright, sharp, well built, underutilized. | |
15 | 962 | A recent acquisition. A very useful full-frame lens. |
Not the full truth
But Lightroom doesn’t know the full truth – for a couple of reasons. First of all it doesn’t know all my lenses. Some do not give proper information in the image file, and are registered as unknown. My Lightroom catalog currently has almost 275,000 images, and of those more than 100,000 are registered with an unknown lens. And Lightroom is of course objective. It just counts my images and tells me what I use most – not what I like most.
Of course I like the lenses I use. That’s why I use them, and why I bought them in the first place. But as you know, lens selection is motivated by the goal and purpose of the photograph being taken – not only by what lens you love – so mostly we choose a lens to fulfill a purpose, not because it’s a favorite.
My top five
I do have some favorites, and if I am to list my favorite lenses, they are from 5 to 1:
5) Sigma 8-16mm f/4.5-5.6
This is just a fantastic lens. I remember seeing it advertised in magazines (yeah, like printed on paper!) when it was introduced, and immediately wanted one. That was in my Minolta-era, and it was out of the question because it was too expensive. I since acquired it for my Nikon DX bodies, and it has shot so many great pictures. Being almost fisheye-wide and still not crazy distorted like a fisheye makes it able to do some real wide-angle-magic.
4) Nikon 60mm f/2.8 macro
This is my new goto-macro. I shoot a lot of macro images and have more macros than a man needs (nah, just kidding!), but this one is the true workhorse in the bunch. Oddly enough the new and modern – and probably superior – 105mm doesn’t get nearly as much use ... or love. It's a newcomer in my lens assortment, and even though I often use it in my macro work, it's still not on the top 15 above.
3) Sigma 10-20mm f/4-5.6
One of my all time favorite lenses, which opened the wide-angle universe on my Nikon DX bodies. Wide and with great color rendition, especially when light is good. I used it at 10mm 90% of the time, and it has just delivered.
2) Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8
What’s not to love? I’m not the only photographer who adores this stable performer. It’s sharp and bright and built to last. Works on DX and full-frame and does almost as good with a tele-converter as without.
1) Nikon 45mm f/2.8 pancake
This might seem an odd choice as a favorite to many. It’s old, it’s manual and it’s not stellar as such, but it’s just a lovely lens, built like they don’t do it anymore and I just like the perspective, the image quality ... and the smooth manual focus. It's not even in my top-15 most used lenses as seen above, but I still love shooting with it, and often bring it as the only lens on a full-frame body.
Again you'll notice that this lens - my favorite - isn't in the top 15 above. Love and usage doesn't need to go hand-in-hand.
Growing on me
When I bought a Nikon D750 some years ago, I got the 28-300mm as a part of the lot, and I have to say that in spite of me not being extremely fond of these do-it-all-lenses, numbers don’t lie, and this one has grown on me.
Like the old 18-200mm for my first D200 body it gets a lot of use. But back then that was what I had. Now I have so many more choices, but the convenience of having the wide zoom range and its good image quality makes me grab this lens more and more often.
A lens I could love
I once borrowed a 300mm f/2.8 from a friend and got the opportunity to shoot about 500 shots with it. Now, there's a lens I could learn to love! I have been looking for one used, but they are (rightfully) pretty expensive, even the old models, and I have no real reason to own one, so I have passed the few that I have seen offered. But man, it's a nice lens!
