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A fun look at the 500px "Popular" photos (part 2) - Exposure Triangle

Part 1 of this series is located here.

500px is a vibrant online photographer's community, kind of the spiritual successor to Flickr but tuned more toward photographers.

As a photographer and a data addict, 500px is interesting. In this analysis we continue looking at the little EXIF box of camera settings and equipment.

If you missed the last part in the series, please give it a glance as to the background. (tl;dr: EXIF data from 20,019 top "Popular" photos on 500px as of 2013-02-06 was scraped, and we look at some patterns and trends.)

The Exposure Triangle, and Focal Length

In this part 2 of the series, we leave equipment aside and look at the aggregate data of the exposure triangle used to take 500px Popular photos.

Analysis of Aperture

Other than focal length, probably the most important creative control. Let's examine what apertures are most commonly seen in this dataset.

In case you haven't seen a boxplot before, I have annotated the first figure. You can see that Family, Fashion, and People are the category types that shoot most often wide, wide-open. This won't come as a surprise by itself, but this really quantifies the difference.

For Family shots, the middle half of all shots seem to have been made between f/2 and f/4.5. Realistically, not many shots are really made slower than f/11 or so. This is similar for People, for which half of all shots seem to have been made between f/2.8 and f/6.2.

Sport, Animals, and Nature all fall somewhere in-between the two extremes, with the most middle-of-the-road f-stop hanging somewhere between 4.4-5.6. This number does not elevate until you get to the Travel, City and Architecture, Concert, and Landscape categories.

For Landscape, the most commonly used f-stop is f/8, and the middle bulk of all shots seem to have been made between f/5.6 and f/12.

Of interest here is how many People shots are done at f/1.4-2 - wide open, for many lenses, just for the sake of depth of field. This may be for the crop bodies, who needs about f/1.8 to get to an FX f/2.8 amount of depth of field.

Also, Animals have its main spike at f/4 - no doubt from f/4 long-focal-length lenses.

Analysis of Focal Length

Another big factor in framing and composition, of course, are the focal lengths. What kind of focal lengths are shot for which categories?

City and Architecture, Landscapes, and Travel used the lowest focal lengths in this dataset, mostly using the 8mm-24mm range. In the meantime, Animals, with a whopping median focal length of close to 300mm, takes the cake as the type of photography with the most demand on zoom. The graph does not show it for clarity, but its top 25th percentile reaches high beyond the 1200mm level.

Analysis of ISO

Probably the least important control, it still is worth seeing.

It surprised me just how uniform this is, across most categories. The median used ISO speed here is 200, with most "middle half" of photos not deviating from ISO 100-400. Though it is used, ISOs of 400-3200 compose a relative minority of all photos across all categories other than Animals and Performing Arts. For Animals/Wildlife presumably the increase is due to the necessary shutter speed, whereas for Performing Arts real low-light conditions are being encountered.

ISO speeds of 6400 and above are rarely ever used amongst Popular photos.

Aperture/Shutter Speed Combinations

What happened to shutter speed? Well, it was reserved for these. This section was by far the most fun to make.

These are "heatmaps". From Blue -> Green -> Yellow -> Red, the progression of colors indicate how often that particular combination of Aperture and Shutter speed was used.

So that outliers don't kick the most bulk of the data out of the frame, I have limited all displayed data to between f/0.7 - f/32 for aperture, and 250s - 1/8000s for shutter speed.

This is a very revealing set of images.

  1. You can identify clusters of the most popular shutter/aperture combinations for each category of images. For example, in this set landscapes and architecture are most often done at f/8-11, 1/250. But you can identify another few clusters - at far-stopped-down apertures of f/11, f/16, and f/22, with longer exposures of 1/2s - 30s.
  2. You can identify some common creative boundaries of categories of images. Know what is common, and what bounds to push. Street photos appear to be captured between f/4-f/5.6, and 1/500-1/60, which would be slow enough for some motion blur that is sometimes seen in many Street images. On the other hand, from the heatmaps you can clearly see it is going to be very rare to see a long-exposure People photo, or a long-exposure Wildlife photo, though it can be done.
  3. You can identify whether a particular category is Aperture-prioritized or Shutter-prioritized. Horizontal "streaks" of clusters would indicate that the shutter speed matters more than the aperture for that particular category, or that there are a wide variety of creative scenarios that can be framed with different apertures. Whereas, vertical streaks would indicate that Aperture (or a certain lens type) was more important than the exact shutter speed, or that many shutter speeds work for that particular image type.

End of Part 2

If you see any interesting patterns in the data, or have any interesting interpretations of the data, please comment and let me know. And like last time, if you want to see any particular data combination, have any questions, or even just to ask "hey, what is that one Animals photo that's strangely a long exposure?", comment as well.

I will be out of town later this week, so Part 3 will have to wait til the later part of this month. Part 3 of this series will examine some longitudinal trends. That is, what has changed between photos uploaded 2-3 years ago and the latest Upcoming photos of this month?

Data disclosure:

Posted Feb 11, 2013, 3:56 PM UTC · edited

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