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The copyright and contact fields are usually the only ones not empty. The rest are pretty much irrelevant except to the magical thinking crowd. (Those are the p

The copyright and contact fields are usually the only ones not empty. The rest are pretty much irrelevant except to the magical thinking crowd. (Those are the people who believe that a particular camera, lens, or aperture/shutter/ISO combination will result in the "same" picture or the "same" image quality. For the most part, the fact that the photographer happened to be holding a D4, a 1DX or an 80-MP Phase One at the time doesn't mean the shot would have been substantially different - at web sizes, at least - from what an entry-level DSLR/MILC or even a decent point-and-shoot would have rendered.) Where provenance matters (particularly in things like the WPPA "Photojournalism" competition division) only the raw file counts. When the piece is part of a tutorial or "how I shot it", the actually relevant and helpful data appears separately as body text with an explanation.

jseliger 13y ago
The rest are pretty much irrelevant except to the magical thinking crowd. (Those are the people who believe that a particular camera, lens, or aperture/shutter/ISO combination will result in the "same" picture or the "same" image quality. I wouldn't go quite that far: some people see a cool shot and wonder how it was created and how the techniques used to create it might be applied elsewhere, much as someone might see a nifty piece of software and want to see the source code.
- stan_rogers 13y ago
  They usually don't look at the important things (most of which is never recorded in EXIF), like where the light is coming from, whether or not reflectors or external (usually non-TTL) flash were used, and so forth. Beyond "wide" or "narrow" (for the sensor format and focal length), the aperture is rarely critical; the same applies to "slow" and "fast" shutter speeds. Both of those can be derived by eye, and if they add up to "not enough light", then there must have been a higher ISO in use. And I'm rather hoping that some day people will figure out that distance controls perspective and focal length merely changes the framing. (Fisheyes being an exception here, but they're sort of easy to spot. And Scheimpflug corrections are not EXIF-compatible.) The actual numbers don't particularly matter, and are highly situational.

jseliger 13y ago

The rest are pretty much irrelevant except to the magical thinking crowd. (Those are the people who believe that a particular camera, lens, or aperture/shutter/ISO combination will result in the "same" picture or the "same" image quality. I wouldn't go quite that far: some people see a cool shot and wonder how it was created and how the techniques used to create it might be applied elsewhere, much as someone might see a nifty piece of software and want to see the source code.

stan_rogers 13y ago
They usually don't look at the important things (most of which is never recorded in EXIF), like where the light is coming from, whether or not reflectors or external (usually non-TTL) flash were used, and so forth. Beyond "wide" or "narrow" (for the sensor format and focal length), the aperture is rarely critical; the same applies to "slow" and "fast" shutter speeds. Both of those can be derived by eye, and if they add up to "not enough light", then there must have been a higher ISO in use. And I'm rather hoping that some day people will figure out that distance controls perspective and focal length merely changes the framing. (Fisheyes being an exception here, but they're sort of easy to spot. And Scheimpflug corrections are not EXIF-compatible.) The actual numbers don't particularly matter, and are highly situational.