How To Fail

I did not have the heart to reply to the guy on FaceBook who was attending a motor sport event soon and wanted anyone who had used his camera (Olympus OM-1) to share some pics and some settings.

This is the perfect storm that will lead to frustration and failure.

There is no useful information in viewing someone else’s images of another event and the same thing goes for sharing settings.

This is a rookie mistake.

What our new-to-Olympus motorsports photographer should do instead is (a) read the manual with camera in hand and using FaceBook and Google to figure out his rather complex – but very capable – camera. This should take a couple of days if done right but the good news is done right once it never needs to be done again. Not done and you’ll be fumbling for what to do over and over again.

The Olympus OM-1 (which is the camera I own) is a micro four-thirds format machine. This means that due to smaller size of the sensor every lens gets a multipication effect of 200%! So a 300mm telephoto on the Olympus is actually a 600mm lens (35mm equivalent) which would be a great lens for shooting motorsports.

If our photographer has the cash there are some super zooms that would be amazing. If it were me and if I had the money I’d buy the 12-100mm or the 40-150 PRO lenses. If I had the cash I’d definitely get the 150-400 Pro (or sd I said the 300mm PRO).

But the Olympus OM-1 has some other tricks up its sleeve. First of all you can setup your own custom settings.

One of the standout features is something called Pro Capture which when the shutter is partially depressed starts firing frames into a buffer. Once the shutter is completely depressed those frames are added to the new frames being shot. In this way the photographer doesn’t miss critical moments that can occur micro-seconds before a photo is actually shot. This means no more missing getting a bird jumping off a branch into the air or no more missing a motorcycle shot as it crashes into the next guy.

But wait there’s more. The Olympus OM-1 can fire at multiple frames per second. For motorsports I’d probably pick 25 as more will just filll up the memory card too fast.

Speaking of memory cards for motorsports I’d buy the fastest card I could afford with the most memory. This is going to be expensive but essential.

Then there are a variety of focusing presets available and if it were me I’d probably go with C-AF. I’d also shoot on shutter priority of at least 1/1000 and I’d probably only shoot JPGs which the camera can process a lot faster than shooting RAW.

Trying to learn a new camera while shooting something as challenging as a motor race isn’t a great idea.

If you’ve got a new camera….RTFM!