The Nysaverse

After reading a blog post by somebody about their lens usage over the past year, I decided to dig into Aperture’s internals and pull up my own lens statistics…

After fighting with Aperture’s screwy internal schema and Aperture’s screwy date/time stamps (which are actually the Unix timestamp minus the Unix timestamp for January 1, 2001 - apparently that’s Apple’s “reference” time), I finally managed to finagle the data from Sqlite (which Apple uses for Aperture’s internal database).

The results for December 2008?

• EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM: 94
• EF 28mm f/1.8 USM: 1 (sad!)
• EF 85mm f/1.8 USM: 340 (yes, Tony, I’ve been favoring that one recently!)
• EF 17-40m f/4L USM:45
• EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM: 424 (borrowed from Tony for a wedding I shot)
• EF 70-200 f/4L IS USM: 105

It’s been an interesting exercise - I also ran the numbers for other months, and my usage certainly varies. Some months the macro lens gets quite a workout, others not so much. You can almost tell when we’ve visited the zoo (the 70-200 pretty much lives on the camera for those visits). Our Door County trip was mostly 17-40 territory (a little macro thrown in).

In case anybody wonders (or I forget by the next time I think about running this query) here’s my SQL:

SELECT zpropertyspecificstring, count(a.zversionid)
FROM zrkversion a

JOIN zrksearchableproperty b ON a.zversionid=b.zversionid
WHERE strftime(’%Y-%m’,a.zimagedate+978307200,’unixepoch’)=’2008-08′
AND b.zpropertyidentifier IN

(SELECT zuuid FROM zrkpropertyidentifier WHERE zpropertykey=’LensModel’)
GROUP BY zpropertyspecificstring;