Range of Focal Lengths

My favorite lens is a Nikon 18-200 wide-angle-to-telephone zoom.  Its not the fastest lens in the world, but with vibration reduction it manages to work in most situations.  But not all.  A faster lens would have helped in a few instances while in India for sure.  But there's no such thing as a fast extreme zoom.  I would have to switch to two lenses - probably 18-70 and 80-200 or so - to achieve the same range and speed things up (and weigh things down - fast zooms are heavy). And switching lenses, especially outdoors in the dust of India, would have had its own series of problems.

So before I made any drastic decisions, I looked at what focal lengths I used while in India.  I choose the first 667 shots (out of 1950 or so) and, checking the metadata in Adobe Lightroom, plotted out the focal lengths of all shots and then my "*****" favorite shots (28 out of 1950).  The results:

                 All      *****
18-30       17%     18%
31-40       13%     14%
41-50       10%       7%
51-60       10%       0
61-70         8%      7%
71-80         3%      4%
81-90         3%      4%
91-100       3%      7%
101-110     2%      0
111-120     3%      7%
121-130     2%      7%
131-190     7%      0      (few shots taken in this range)
191-200   18%    21%

Over half of the photographs were taken between 18-70mm (27-105 given the size of my digital sensor on the Nikon D300). BUT then there were those 18-21% shot at 200mm. Changing lenses would definitely have been a drawback in an active environmental like the Pushkar Mela. I noted that as I recorded the data, I would jump from 18mm to 50mm back to 18mm and then to 200mm in consecutive shots. So changing lenses would likely have resulted in missed opportunities. On the other hand, with a faster lens with even higher quality glass, I may also have had some * and ** shots turn into **** and ***** ones. 

While a time consuming exercise, I think it was worth it to get an understanding of how I use my lens - and that the use covers the full focal length range of the lens.  That doesn't mean I won't consider a faster lens, probably covering the wide-angle to normal (18-70) range; it just means that when I'm in an active festival-oriented environment, I'll probably stick with the trusty 18-200 model for quick response to changing circumstances.

You might want to do the same exercise to see how you use your zoom lenses, especially before buying something new.