How Your Focal Length Data Might Be Telling You to Buy a Different Lens

If you shoot wildlife and you've never looked at which focal lengths you actually use most, you're probably making lens decisions based on guesswork. Jan Wegener and Duade Paton did exactly that analysis, and what they found challenges some of the most common assumptions about which lenses wildlife shooters actually need.

Coming to you from Jan Wegener and Duade Paton, this data-driven conversation between Wegener and Paton starts with a simple but revealing exercise: pulling focal length usage stats from their Lightroom catalogs. Wegener found that 50% of his shots on the Canon RF 200-800mm f/6.3-9 IS USM were taken at the full 800mm end, and 75% were taken between 500 and 800mm. That means if he were using a 100-500mm lens for the same subjects, he'd be coming up short on reach three-quarters of the time. Paton's data told a similar story from a different angle: across roughly 400,000 images, his three most-used focal lengths were 600mm, 840mm (600mm with a 1.4x teleconverter), and 1,200mm (600mm with a 2x teleconverter). His third most-used lens overall was the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS, which he doesn't even own but borrows when he can. The takeaway is concrete: before buying a lens, pull your focal length data and find out where you actually spend your time.

The ISO discussion is just as interesting. Wegener's most-used ISO was 3,200, accounting for nearly 40% of his shots, followed by 6,400 at around 28%. He regularly shoots at 1/4000s or faster and considers high ISO with fast shutter speed the default, not the exception. Paton shoots more often in open sunlight and gravitates toward ISO 1,600 and 800. The difference comes down to environment: Wegener is often in shaded bush land in low light, chasing fast-moving small birds, while Paton shoots in brighter, more open conditions. Neither approach is wrong, but the gap between their settings illustrates why "always shoot low ISO" is advice worth questioning hard.

The conversation also covers gear philosophy in a way that avoids the usual clichés. Both have taken strong images on old bodies like the Canon EOS 5D Mark IV with its six frames per second and limited wildlife autofocus. But Wegener makes a specific point: when you're chasing genuinely rare moments, shots that might appear once or twice in a session, a full buffer, a missed autofocus lock, or the absence of pre-capture can cost you the image entirely. That's a different argument than "better gear makes better photos." It's about eliminating failure points when the margin for error is essentially zero. The video also gets into shooting position, how a few centimeters of height difference can completely change the depth and feel of a water-level shot, as well as how to think about managing your archive without either hoarding everything or deleting too aggressively.

Check out the video above for the full rundown from Wegener and Paton, including their take on the worst advice circulating in wildlife photography and how finding the right location can matter more than almost any gear upgrade.