The Complete Guide to Olympus' Om-d E-m1

By Gary L. Friedman

The OM-D E-M1 camera has been hailed as “The Kind of Micro Four Thirds” format for good reason! The engineers gave this camera one of the most customizable and nuanced user interfaces ever. While a good move, even experienced users will sometimes need help getting their arms around all of the different permutations of features or groups of features spread across different menus.

In this detailed and easy-to-read reference, professional photographer Gary L. Friedman simplifies the complexity and provides the shortest learning curve for this infinitely-configurable camera.

Get the most out of your investment from the most highly-regarded source of books for digital cameras!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312356160

Book preview

The Complete Guide to Olympus' OM-D E-M1 Camera

Professional Insights for the Experienced Shooter

Version 1.0

ISBN 978-1-312-35616-0

Published by The Friedman Archives Press

Copyright © 2014 Gary L. Friedman All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced either in print or in any digital format without express written permission. Contact the author at [e-mail]

Gratitude

I would like to thank the following for their invaluable contributions to the quality of this undertaking:

Mike Hendren

Sue Hutchins

John Kalb

Mike Nelson

For Those of You Who Bought the Printed B&W or E-reader Version

The price of the printed books come with a free, full-color .pdf version of the book. Just send me an email at [e-mail], send me the receipt of the book you bought (if you didn’t buy it from the FriedmanArchivesPress.com website, then I don’t have your customer information), and I’ll send you a download link. (The same thing goes for those of you who bought this book for your B&W e-reader.)

Amazon customers – This book is so large that it had to be split across two volumes; however Amazon’s rules say that EVERY BOOK they sell must have page numbering start on Page 1. Don’t know how to accommodate that and still have the cross-reference page numbers work. And so, you’ll have to purchase Volume II directly from print-on-demand publisher Lulu.com here: http://tinyurl.com/bupkqmh

Android and iOS Readers

If you are reading the .pdf version of this e-book on an Android or iOS plastform, your reading experience might be enhanced if you viewed the .pdf file via one of these free apps:

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About Gary Friedman

Gary L. Friedman is a professional photographer who has traveled the world with both film and digital cameras. He runs the stock image website www.FriedmanArchives.com, and gives digital photography seminars worldwide aimed primarily at beginners who wish to learn the basics and improve their creative photography. (He conducts photo expeditions around the world too, geared especially for the unique needs of photographers.)

Before graduating to photography he was a rocket scientist for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he patented the image authentication system used in high-end Canon and Nikon cameras. He has been published in books, newspapers and magazines worldwide, and was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records while in college (go ahead and search the FriedmanArchives.com website if you want to find out what he did to get included).

Despite his mastery of the technical background, Mr. Friedman has an approachable and easy-going teaching style that makes his books a pleasure to read. You can read more about his background at http://friedmanarchives.com/bio.htm.

Chapter 0 Introduction

Continuing the OM Tradition……

In 1973, Olympus introduced the first model in its now legendary line of OM cameras, and continued to produce them well into the 21st century. Then, in 2012, they released the OM-D E-M5, the first in what has become their digital flagship series. Now, we have the amazing Olympus OM-D E-M1, and just take a look at how closely it resembles the 30-year-old OM-4 shown to the right.

Digital cameras are undergoing revolutionary, transformational change, and it’s happening right now. While each new camera makes evolutionary changes in sensor capabilities (number of megapixels, low noise ability, etc.) and camera functions, the revolution is all about camera and lens sizes and weights. Take a look at http://camerasize.com/compare/#153,482 and compare the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV to the E-M1 … go ahead, I’ll wait. Isn’t that amazing … David vs Goliath! Plus, the E-M1 has very similar image quality (IQ) to that of the 1D Mk IV. Yes, the Canon is 4 years older but look at the size difference. (The cost difference is also quite significant.)

So, in our E-M1 we now have a very capable camera in a small, light form factor that has most of the bells and whistles we want in our cameras. It’s very fast (startup, focus, shooting fps), has a terrific Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) and LCD touch screen, proven IQ that is more than acceptable to many pros around the world, and it also uses small lenses allowing us all to greatly reduce the size and weight of our kits.

The E-M1 is the next progression in Olympus’s drive to fundamentally change the camera landscape. Here, they’ve combined the best of three of their previous very popular cameras: the E-5, E-P5, and E-M5.

Naming of the OM-D was confusing when the E-M5 was released. No one knew whether to call it the OM-D or the E-M5 or use the full name. Finally that’s been cleared up: OM-D apparently names the series while E-M1 is the model. So throughout this book I will just refer to them as the E-M1 and E-M5 (and save a few pages). J

Why This Book Is Needed

I’m going to state something that should be obvious to any of you who have owned the camera for more than a couple of weeks: As great as the camera is, it has way too many options. Most functions can be accessed 3 different ways. To select things, you can use the arrow keys or the touch screen. Just about every single button and function is reassignable to fit your unique, personal needs. There are a gazillion ways to customize it, and all of the related options are sometimes spread across several different menus.

And while that can all be a good thing from an engineer’s point of view, from the point of view of the new user who is just trying to become acquainted it is needlessly confusing. And so my goal in this book is to cut through all that – just tell you what you need to know, how to set the important things, so you can get out there and get the results you want right away. The really obscure functions (and there are MANY of them – like change the direction you rotate the control dials or the focusing ring (which readers of languages which go from right to left might appreciate) will be covered, but briefly.

Now, a word about nomenclature. In my previous books I’d usually refer to menu items using the same icons as what appears on the screen so there would be no confusion. For example,

MENU --> --> --> Settings

While a proper approach, early testing with proofreaders across multiple devices (kindle, smart phone, etc.) uncovered the fact that these icons were just too difficult for most people to read. And so they’ve been abbreviated to something like this:

MENU --> Gear D --> Info / Settings --> Settings

Which should be much easier to read (and much faster to layout!)

Okay, let’s get started!

Chapter 1 The E-M1 in a Nutshell

First, let’s talk about the things I like most about this camera:

· Controls and Customizability

· The Touch screen LCD

· IBIS (In-Body Image Stabilization

· Excellent Wireless Flash capability.

So what’s new about the E-M1?

Noteworthy Features

New 16Mp Sensor with PDAF and no AA (low pass) filter

Olympus has a large core of E-5 shooters (an older digital camera which used a mirror), many of whom have refused to switch to the E-M5 because of painfully slow AF while using the required adapter for the Four Thirds mount lenses that they had accumulated. The lenses would work fine in every other respect. In fact, Olympus has acquired the reputation of building some of the best lenses available, so their E-5 customers have been reluctant to unload their precious 4/3’s mount lenses.

To address this issue of poor AF on mirrorless bodies, Olympus has followed in the footsteps of several other manufacturers (like Sony, for one) and added Phase Detection AF (PDAF) pixels to the sensor. This PDAF kicks in when a 4/3 mount lens is attached and gives all of those legacy lenses nice, quick AF. So now you have 81 Contrast Detect AF points, and 37 Phase Detect points. Together they cover most of the image allowing for AF across almost the entire scene. The PDAF also work with M.Zuiko lenses.

Putting phase-detect AF into a sensor designed to measure light is a work of genius. And I could explain to you how it works, but I’d be doing you a disservice since the best explanation I ever read about on-chip PDAF comes from dpreview.com, when they described how Fujifilm did it back in 2010: http://tinyurl.com/acr4no7. I definitely can’t improve upon it. Because these PDAF pixel pairs also gather some light, you will not notice any holes in your image as a result of this new feature.

The removal of the low pass filter is notable in that it should result in sharper, more detailed images.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is the new norm, the standard for modern digital cameras. Olympus has done a very nice job of making their implementation of Wi-Fi not only easy to setup and use, but also very functional thanks to a well thought out application for smartphones and tablets. One of the first things you should do (if you plan on using this at all) is download the free OLYMPUS Image Share application to your smartphone and/or tablet, so you’ll be ready to control your camera and transfer images to your device. (Chapter 9 goes into the nuances of how to set up and use these features.)

More/Better controls

With this iteration of the OM-D series, Olympus has really improved the user interface, i.e., the camera controls. They’ve added a couple of buttons, made them all more functional, and placed them in better, easier to use locations on the camera body. With practice, you should be able to touch the control you want without ever removing your eye from the viewfinder.

In fact, the default setup is so good that I suggest giving it a try before diving into the menu system and changing how it all works. The engineers at Olympus have obviously looked at this camera design with a photographer’s perspective, and made it easy for us … photographers … to easily and quickly change the settings we need to change.

One notable and easily overlooked change is the addition of the Lock Button to the Mode Dial. Press it down and the Mode Dial is locked in position and can’t be rotated, either accidentally or on purpose. To restore its functionality, press again, the button pops up and the dial can once more be turned.

1/8,000 sec. vs 1/4,000 and ISO 100

It’s probably rare that we need 1/8,000th of a second to freeze action in a shot, and ISO 200 has become good enough in most cameras to negate a real need for ISO 100 in terms of IQ. So what’s the big deal?

Well, many users of the older E-M5 have found themselves shooting in bright light and wanting a shallow depth of field (dof), but was unable to use a large aperture like f/1.4 because ISO 200 and 1/4,000th of a second would overexpose the image. So this higher shutter speed combined with an ISO of 100 (unobviously labeled Low in the ISO menu) now gives us two extra stops of bright light/big aperture shootability.

Electronic Viewfinder

The EVF on the E-M1 is considered one of the best currently available. What makes it so good? Well, for one thing it has what Olympus calls Adaptive Brightness Technology, which automatically adjusts the backlight in the EVF to provide a natural brightness like that of a conventional optical viewfinder.

The EVF also has some infrared proximity detectors just to the lower right of its lens which will automatically reroute the display information from the LCD to the EVF when it detects that something is close. You can quickly disable this auto-switching feature if you want to – just hold down the Live View button (to the left of the EVF) and when the menu comes up choose EVF Auto Switch – OFF.

Olympus has even allowed you to adjust the color balance on the E-M1 in case you find a discrepancy between it and the rear LCD (see TIP box, next page).

The EVF is an essential ingredient that brings many of the benefits of the E-M1’s mirrorless design to you:

You can see how your image will look before you shoot (exposure and white balance),

You can see a live histogram,

It gives you tools for focusing manually (Focus Assist Magnify and Peaking functions).

The viewfinder is not hopelessly dark when shooting with neutral density filters.

The EVF isn’t perfect, though. When shooting under any kind of fluorescent light (whether it be the older tubular bulbs or the newer compact fluorescent variety), the white balance you see in Live View may fluctuate and doesn’t always match the final image. Eyeglass wearers shooting outdoors on a bright day say they sometimes have to shield the sun when it shines between their face and the eyeglasses.

Professional event videographers just laugh at all the DSLR guys who try to shoot video outdoors on bright days (their cameras don’t have an EVF, so they have to use the rear LCD screen to shoot with, which is almost always washed out by the sun.) (Just sayin’...)

Higher res LCD at 1 M dots

The LCD on the E-M1 has a bumped up resolution over that on the E-M5: a little over 1 million dots compared to 610,000. This is a large increase and is quite noticeable in the resolution you’ll see there.

TruePic VII

The E-M1 has a new image processor called the TruePic VII, and it’s main feature is known as Fine Detail II. According to Olympus, this new processing engine optimizes image processing in relation to the lens in use and shooting conditions. What this means to us is that the TruePic VII has a lens database which allows it to recognize the attached (Olympus) lens and vary the processing according to each lenses’ particular characteristics.

Since color aberration and sharpness can differ from one lens to the next, the new processor will automatically try to better correct and sharpen each image. It also takes the aperture setting into account when determining the optimum sharpness for each lens.

Also, since the new sensor doesn’t have a low pass filter, the processor helps in reducing moiré, which can be more pronounced without that anti-aliasing filter.

So all-in-all, the new TurePic VII should result in improvements in several areas of image processing leading to better images.

Bigger buffer During Sequential Shooting

The improved processor also helps in another area and that is in high-speed sequential shooting. Faster processing and a bigger buffer lets you shoot more images during continuous shooting before the camera slows down due to buffer constraints.

In my informal testing, I shot in Continuous High at 10 fps, and got the following results, listed as the number of images recorded before the camera had to go to a slower frame rate:

· RAW = 37 images

· RAW+LF (Large, Fine JPG quality) = 34 images

· LF = 44 images

The bottom line is that with any image quality, you’ll be able to shoot at 10 fps for almost four full seconds.

Having the ability to shoot in such rapid-fire fashion may tempt a few people to employ the spray-and-pray approach to photography, which is essentially take as many pictures as fast as you can, and hopefully one of them will be a perfect, Pulitzer Prize-winning shot! Let me save you a lot

of memory cards and disk space by gently deterring you from using this approach. It is generally wasteful and, even in the world of sports, doesn’t work nearly as well as developing the skill of anticipating the decisive moment and pressing the shutter release at the right time.

Color Creator Tool

The Color Creator Tool is a very interesting and powerful addition to the functions available to creative photographers. It presents you with a color circle, similar to what you see in many applications when you go to adjust the color of your font or background. Once activated, you can move around the circle to pick any color of the rainbow (and many shades in between), then adjust the saturation by moving from the outer edge of the circle toward the inner edge. This adjusts the color cast of the entire image. I know it sounds confusing, but it’s really quite simple and we’ll cover it in detail starting on page 189.

Freeze proof down to -10C (14F)

The E-M1 boasts of dust and moisture resistance, and now Olympus is claiming Cold Weather Protection to the list of features. Don’t get too excited about that, though, since in my experience batteries tend to be the first thing to die in cold weather, so it doesn’t matter what the camera can sustain. If you’re shooting in cold weather, just make sure you keep lots of spare batteries in a pocket close to your skin, and don’t change lenses outdoors (condensation will get onto the sensor which won’t help your image quality.)

Photo Story (Mode Dial)

Here’s something fun to play with. On the mode dial, you’ll find a position for Photo Story. Essentially, Photo Story combines several images into a sort of collage, with several different layouts and options available. Just pick the layout you want, frame and shoot, then let the camera combine the images to complete this cool effect. I talk about the details of this mode starting on page 240.

Same Battery as E-M5

If you’re a previous/current E-M5 shooter, then it’s quite nice that the batteries are compatible. I always try to have a couple of extra batteries for these modern cameras, because their small size requires small batteries with small capacities, and there’s a lot of electronic stuff going on inside. J

Time Lapse

Olympus has finally added a built-in Time Lapse feature on the E-M1. It may not be a necessity for most of us, but it can be very useful, a lot of fun, and can produce some interesting and amazing sequences without needing to invest in special equipment. It allows you to either produce a sequence of still images, or to also automatically create a movie from those images. The details start on page 219.

Handheld High Dynamic Range (HDR)

In the Introduction to Histograms section of this book I’ll talk about the limited dynamic range of the digital sensor, and how our eyes can see a significantly greater range of light (bright to dark) than what the camera can see. Over the past century there have been lots of attempts to correct this intentional artifact of photographic representation of real light, trying to render the image so it looks more like how we saw it. The latest technique for trying to achieve this wider dynamic range comes in what’s become known as High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.

The time-honored way to create an HDR image is to put the camera on a tripod and take 3 (sometimes more) pictures of the same scene, each at different exposures – some darker, some lighter. Then, you merge them all in your computer so it sort of looks like the way you saw it in real life. An example of HDR photography appears in Figure 1-6.

Up until now, HDR photography was labor-intensive and unintuitive – in fact, I once wrote a whole article on the subject and gave real-life examples of how to create these images in my Advanced Topics 2 e-booklet (available from www.FriedmanArchives.com/ebooks) (Sorry for the shameless plug! J ).

That was HDR the old way. With the E-M1, this useful feature is significantly easier to use. For starters, there’s no need for a tripod anymore. With the feature enabled (page 221), you just point the camera at your subject, and press the shutter release button once. The camera will take four sequential pictures at different exposures and merge them in the camera for you. No computer needed. And the camera will automatically try to align the images for you before merging them into a single .jpg image. Pretty impressive stuff. This feature is discussed more starting on page 221.

Multipe Exposure and merge Pictures

High-end film cameras used to be able to offer the ability to do double exposures (to let you do cool things like superimpose the moon in a twilight shot like in Figure 1-7). But that feature went away with the advent of digital. Now it’s back, and it can be a great creative tool!

In addition to being able to do a double-exposure, the Merge Pictures option lets you create a double exposure by picking two images you’ve already shot and merging them after-the-fact. Nice! I talk more about this feature starting on page 221.

Edit RAW Files in-camera

Hate tweaking things in Photoshop? The E-M1 gives you the ability to do an insane amount of in-camera corrections either before or after-the-fact, including the ability to tweak RAW files (which result in a .jpg output), a feature I’ve never seen on