Tag Archives: Equipment

Equipment, How-to, Photography

Setting a Custom White Balance in the Olympus OM-D E-M5

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This is a short discussion/tutorial on how to go about setting the Custom White Balance on the Olympus OM-D E-M5. The scanned image above shows my handwritten notes on the page in the owner’s manual that explains how to do this.

I have been wrestling with myself as to whether I really wanted to create a post such as this one. In the end I convinced myself that it wouldn’t hurt anyone, but might be helpful to a fellow photographer. So here goes…

Everyone who knows me and/or reads my blog posting, knows that I purchased an Olympus OM-D E-M5 in late May, and that only two days after I received it we left town to spend a week in Ruidoso, New Mexico. We had rented a house, and didn’t fill up all of our time doing all sorts of touristy things. That gave us plenty of time to relax, and more importantly, it gave me lots of time to read the owner’s manual and to practice with this new camera.

It’s a good thing, as there are a LOT of settings that you can change, to allow you to customize the camera to the way that you prefer it to operate.  I am certain that I spent at least 20 hours that week with the owner’s manual in my lap, marking it up with yellow and red highlighters. The manual seems to have all of the information that you need, but it is not organized very well. You spend way too much time flipping back and forth making sure that everything is understood correctly.

At the end of the week, I felt like I understood all but three features. I sort of understood how to set a Custom White Balance and also how to focus using the Zoom Frame AF. I never did figure out how to wirelessly trigger an off camera flash unit from a flash unit mounted in the camera’s hot shoe.

As I said at the opening of this post, this is a short discussion/tutorial on how to go about setting the Custom White Balance on the Olympus OM-D E-M5.

But before I get into the details, I need to show you which of the menu items that I changed from the default settings.

First, you need to know that this camera has only 5 main categories of menus, as shown here.

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Looking down the left side, you see them listed as Shooting Menu 1, Shooting Menu 2, Playback Menu, Custom Menus (which is selected), and lastly the Setup Menu. There are 11 subcategories of Custom Menus, labeled A through K.

Here are the scanned pages from my owner’s manual that show the default settings for each of the menu items. In the right side margin you will see my handwritten notes showing what changes I made, if any.

I have no intention of explaining why I made each and every one of these changes. If you have this camera, you have the full manual (which you can download from here), and you can read the descriptions yourself.

It is worth mentioning that the changes to the Dial Functions at the bottom of Custom Menu B were done to move the Exposure Compensation to the rear wheel (operated by my thumb). This makes this camera behave like my Canon 5D Mark II, and it is what I am used to.

In Custom Menu D, in Control Settings, for P/A/S/M, you will see that I have both Live Control and Live SCP (Super Control Panel) turned on. Later on, you will see that this causes trouble when trying to perform a Custom White Balance. (It gets much simpler if you only have the Live SCP set to On.)

Further down in Custom Menu D, for the item named LV Close Up Mode, I changed it to Mode 2, which was recommended in the excellent user guide put together by R. Butler and Timur Born of DPReview.com. That mode helps a lot when trying to get the Zoom Frame AF to work (page 45).

Note that in Custom Menu J, the Built-in EVF Style mode was changed to Style 3. This has the Electronic View Finder (EVF) display the same items that you’ve chosen to display on the rear monitor (but not simultaneously). Once again, thanks to the two at DPReview.com for that one!

And there you have it. Yes, I changed several of the menu items, but ony 5 or 6 of them really made a real difference to how the camera behaves.

Now, down to the real purpose of this post: how to set the Custom White Balance on the Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera.

First, you need to know that this is not what the owner’s manual calls it! Look closely at page 50.

In the manual, Olympus named the feature Custom White Balance the one where you simply set the color temperature (Kelvin) as a numerical value by using the left and right navigation arrows.

No, Olympus chose to name the feature that I want to use “One-Touch White Balance”. That’s really bizarre, since I haven’t figured out how to do this in less than 6 button pushes!  So, forget the name One-Touch White Balance – everyone else refers to it as Custom White Balance.

OK, so here is how you do it:

If you really want to read this, click on the image to show it full size and then right-click on it to save it to your computer. You can then print it out and put it behind page 51 in your manual.

I realize that this is a rather unorthodox approach. If you really cannot read it, leave a comment to this post stating that, and if you want, you can contact me and I might be persuaded to actually type it up.

Just to help in understanding my handwritten instruction, this is what the Super Control Panel looks like:

And this is what the Live Control looks like:

Photography, Sports, Travel

Ruidoso Downs Horse Races

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This post contains lots of photos, but I think that I need them all to tell the photography story that I want to tell. As you can see in the photo above, it was nearly 5 weeks ago on Friday, June 1, 2012 when Barb and I visited the Ruidoso Downs horse racing track in the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico.

I had never been to a horse race in my life, before this day, but many of the people that we had visited with that week in Ruidoso had highly recommended it. We had spent a pretty leisurely week up to that point, where I had spent most of my time studying the manual for my new Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera. We had only scheduled one “tourist activity” for each day, and today was going to be the horse races.Even though Barb had been there once before, many years ago, frankly, I had no idea what to expect.

Walking only a few yards from where I had taken the photo above (just off the highway), you can see the grandstands across the narrow valley at the base of this small mountain.

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As we drove up their entrance drive, I just had to stop to take this photo showing the large bend of the oval dirt track.

I was rather surprised that there was no entrance fee, and that the parking was free, too. We only had to walk about 100 yards (meters) from the car to the closest end of the grandstand. That’s where the entrance to the Jockey’s Club was. I just assumed that the entrance that we went through in order to pay to get into the grandstand.

The friendly group at the door let me know that we were welcome to pay to come into the Jockey Club, but if we just wanted to get into the grandstand, we just needed to walk 20 yards to our right. We did exactly that, and I was completely surprised that we could just walk right in – for free – and sit wherever we wanted to!

We had arrived just as the first race of the day had finished. There is a 25 minute delay between each race. (I think there were going to be 9 races that afternoon.) During that delay, they water down the track, and then drag an implement behind a tractor to get the dirt just how they want it.

While we were waiting for the next race to begin, an usher asked to see our tickets. Tickets? What tickets?

I know that I had a dumb expression on my face as I told him that we never encountered anyone asking us to pay for a ticket. He told us that we were sitting in “Reserved Seating” and that if were welcome to sit in the bleachers down below – which were indeed free.

OK, so we moved about 10 feet closer to the dirt track, but our legs were in the direct sun.

And they’re off!  What the heck?  The next race had started and I hadn’t even prepared my camera! Just get what you can…. I raised my camera to my eye, saw the that Olympus instantly focused on the lead horse, so I snapped this photo just as they crossed the finish line!

Wow! We were 30 feet (10 meters) or so from the track, and you could FEEL the horses pounding the ground with their hooves!

Checking the OLED display on the back of my camera, I saw that I had indeed caught the lead horse just after it had crossed the finish line, but wait just a darned minute… horses do not have 8 legs!

Hmmm… The camera was in my default settings: ISO 200, f/8.0, aperture priority, which resulted in a shutter speed of only 1/160 second. No wonder that fast moving horse had 8 legs!

While the grounds keepers prepared the track for the next race, I had some time to think about which camera settings I wanted to change.

I had read in the camera owner’s manual that the camera could shoot 9 frames per second (fps), and this seemed like a great place to try that out! I also changed to Shutter Priority mode, and set the shutter speed to 1/1600 second. To keep a good depth-of-field I didn’t want a wide aperture, so I had to increase the ISO to 800 just to keep the aperture to f/10. I also changed the autofocus to Constant autofocus mode. Lastly, I changed the Image Stabilization to mode IS2, which is for horizontal panning when following moving objects.

After the water truck and the tractor, the jockeys and the horses for the next race always ride past the grandstand and then double-back to get to the starting line.

The races today did not go around the oval track. Instead, they were straight line races, just like at a dragster race – but with about 10 horses at the same time!  As they got the horses into the starting gate, I simply walked down to the railing at the edge of the track, and positioned myself so that I had a good view of the finish line. I zoomed my 12-50mm lens all the way out to 50mm.

And they’re off!  It doesn’t take these race horses long – maybe 7 or 8 seconds before they get close enough that I push the shutter button halfway and lock focus onto the lead horse, and instantly push it the rest of the way and take the following sequence of photos.

Now that you have had a look at this sequence, I want to let you know that I only showed you every other photo (I skipped the odd numbered photos, and only showed you the even numbered photos). Even at the 4.5 frames per second that I am showing you, you should get a sense of just how fast these horses are moving as they came flying past me!

Also worth noting is that as I kept the shutter button held down, and since I was shooting RAW + JPG, the buffer in the camera filled up, and there was a delay between that last shot and the next shot.

Also worth noting is that I did not understand at the time that when the Olympus OM-D E-M5 is shooting a 9 fps sequence, it locks focus at the time of the first shot – even if the autofocus is set to Constant Autofocus. What saved me here is that my aperture was f/10, which gives a fairly deep depth-of-field, especially on a Micro Four-Thirds sized image sensor.

As we waited for the next race, I reviewed the photos on the back of the camera. I didn’t like my composition. I had kept the lead horse in the center (where my focus point was), and so all of the horses were on the left side of the picture, with the right hand side being empty. I made a mental note to try and improve on that. I also told myself to wait until they got a little closer to the finish line before I started machine-gunning RAW + JPG images onto my UHS-1 speed-class SDHC memory card.

It began to get darker as rain clouds approached, and I refused to increase the ISO setting above 800, but that meant that I had to open the aperture form f/10 to f/6.3 AND lengthen the shutter from 1/1600 to “only” 1/1000 second.

Finish line!

The previous 5 photos were taken consecutively – I did not leave out every other one this time. I reviewed this sequence on the back of my camera while they paraded the jockeys and horses for the next race.

It was raining to the south of us, and those rain clouds were blocking the sun. I was going to have to change my settings to compensate accordingly.

Fortunately, the rain was passing us to the east.

Even so, it was getting darker. I was already at the widest aperture that this lens was capable of (f/6.3), but I had to do something. I lengthened the shutter to 1/800 second, but still needed to do something in addition. All I could think of at the time was to zoom the lens to a wider angle, which would support a wider aperture of f/5.7 that I needed. That resulted in a 36mm focal length, equivalent to 72mm on a full frame camera. (Later that evening, I realized that I should have just switched to my 45m f/1.8 lens!)

I decided that I now felt comfortable enough with my timing to wait for them to get closer to the finish line, that I also decided to change to the “low speed” Continuous Shooting Mode of 3.9 fps.

I can’t remember why I made that decision at that time. Maybe I remembered reading in the manual that the OM-D E-M5 will focus between each shot at this lower speed, or maybe I just got lucky. For whatever the reason, it really helped, because I now had a much narrower depth-of-field due to my wider aperture setting.

And they’re off!

So I follow the lead horse, keeping my focus point in it, until I think I’ve timed it just right.

Things move very fast, and I just saw another horse enter the left side of the frame….

Wow! Horse #10 wins the race!

Too bad that I didn’t even know that horse #10 existed until it went thundering right past me – only 3 or 4 yards (meters) away….But the continuous autofocus had locked onto the front legs of horse #3, not horse #10!

Maybe, just maybe I’ll get a good sequence before we get rained on!

The rain was staying east of us, but it just kept getting darker. I had to to open the aperture some more – to f/5.3, which meant that I was now zoomed to only 28 mm.

I also didn’t like the limited number of frames that I captured when using the “low speed” continuous shooting mode, so I went back to the 9 fps rate.

This is the photo captured as they crossed the finish line.

Notice how the horses change their stride immediately after they cross the finish line. They don’t stop instantly, just like you need several steps after running full speed before you slow down and stop.

We could smell the rain coming, and we didn’t want to walk the 100 yards back to the car in the rain, so we decided it was time to go now.

Just before we left the grandstand, I turned around and took this last photo. Barb and I had been sitting on the bleacher in front of the two guys in the white cowboy hats near the left edge of this photo.

I never really got the sequence of photos that I was hoping to get, but I had a really fun time trying, and I’m still amazed that it didn’t cost us any money at all!

Austin, Equipment, Flowers, Photography, Uncategorized

A Neighborhood Walk with the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Camera

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On May 1st, I went down to Precision Camera here in Austin and ordered one of the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four-Thirds cameras (in silver and black) with the 12-50mm f/3.5-6.3 “kit” lens. I also ordered 3 prime lenses to round out the system. They were the Olympus 25mm f/1.4, the Panasonic Leica 25mm f/1.4, and the Olympus 45mm f/1.8 lenses.

Since the Micro Four-Thirds cameras have a 2x sensor magnification from that of a full-frame 35mm camera, the 12-50mm kit lens would be the equivalent of a 24-100mm lens on a full-frame 35mm camera. The 3 prime lenses would perform like 24m, 50mm, and 90mm equivalents.

On Wednesday May 23rd, everything came in, except for the Panasonic Leica 25mm f/1.4 lens. We were leaving for a week of vacation on Sunday May 27th, and I had pretty much come to grips that we would be taking the old Canon camera 5D Mk II on this week long trip to Ruidoso, New Mexico.

By getting a brand new camera “system” just days before a week-long vacation didn’t give me much time to learn how to use it – but I was going to “learn it as I went”. On Saturday morning, less than 24 hours before we were going to leave, I decided that I would take my new camera with me on my usual Neighborhood Walk. I’ve been walking this same route up to 4 times a week for over 11 years now, and I had never taken a camera with me before. The journey always starts right here at my front door.

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I was in my walking shoes and shorts, and I was planning on getting somewhat sweaty, so there was no way I was going to bring along a camera bag. No, I was going to have to travel light – really light.

So, before I left the house, I put the 45mm f/1.8 lens on the camera. I did not even have a lens hood – they are not in stock anywhere right now. I did have a B+W UV Haze filter on the lens. Even so, I knew that I was going to have to be careful about the direction that I pointed the lens, with respect to the angle to the sun, to prevent unwanted lens flare.

In the 3 short evenings that I had practiced with the camera in the house, I had left it in the default setting of “Auto ISO”. I had also read several reviewers on the internet say that the high ISO sensitivity of this camera was good at least all the way up to 6400, so I set that as the upper limit that the camera would use for Auto ISO.  However, when I looked at those practice photos on my computer monitor, I was pretty displeased. This new Olympus OM-D E-M5 was a huge improvement over my Canon PowerShot G-12, but it wasn’t perfect, either. I would say that the Olympus at ISO 6400 looked about as speckled as the G-12 does at ISO 1000.

For this walk, I set the ISO to 200 and left it there. If I needed more light, I was going to use the “business end” of the aperture settings that this 45mm f/1.8 lens was capable of – i.e. f/1.8 – and would also allow me to se how well it performed with narrow depth of field situations such as this:

And this:

Normally this 3 mile walk through my hilly neighborhood takes me anywhere between 47 and 49 minutes. Due to my stopping and taking photos of anything that looked interesting to me, on this day it took more than an additional 30 minutes more.

It was mainly overcast early in the walk, but the longer I was out, the more the sun would shine through the clouds. Photos of plants simply do not look good when taken in direct sunlight. As a result, I past by many interesting photo opportunities while the sun was out, and had to move quickly to capture what I could when the sun  was behind a cloud.

This next photo was taken while the sun was out, but it was on the shady side of the Magnolia tree. On my first shot of this blossom, it was pretty well underexposed. Camera meters get fooled by scenes that vary significantly from an average brightness. The white petals on this blossom were supposed to be white, and not gray, so I simply set the Exposure Compensation to +1.0 and took this photo.

Now I had to turn and walk up my longest (not my steepest) hill. Along the way, I noticed how well the yards were looking, as compared to this time last year, when Austin was in a terrible drought.

At the top of the hill, the sun went behind some heavy clouds, but I still had plenty of light to shoot with. The next shot with the two cacti was taken with a shutter speed of 1/2000 of a second. The aperture wasn’t wide open, but even at f/3.2 – and on a Micro Four-Thirds camera – it did a very nice job of blurring the cactus in the background.

So I was just walking along shooting when the clouds were helping me out.

There is a style of photography known as “Street Shooting” where the photographer is simply out on the street, taking photos of interesting architectural features of buildings, and usually more important than that, they are attempting to photograph people candidly, in their daily life – and with their natural facial expressions (not a posed, fake smile).

There are some really good photographers who do this and are also “bloggers on the internet”. Robin Wong and Kirk Tuck are two of the 3 blogs that I read on a regular basis.

I learn a lot from reading what they, and Libby over at Ohno Studios put in their blogs. I like them, because they aren’t trying to sell me something. (OK, Kirk occasionally reminds his readers about the books that he’s authored.)

Now between those three “internet photographers”, I’ve never once see any of them come close to mentioning the type of “Street Shooting” that I was really enjoying on this Saturday morning.  I suppose I still have a lot to learn….

At the base of my steepest 1-block-long hill, I stopped to photograph a few things in this yard before I tackled the hill.

The sun was out most of the time now, but when I saw some movement in my peripheral vision, something instinctively made me raise my camera and get off this one shot just as the doe jumped into a full sprint.

OK, about another block beyond the deer siting, is my second steepest hill, but the good news it is just a few hundred yards from our home.

I could easily tell when the sun was out by observing my own shadow on the sidewalk.

I’m not sure if that qualifies as Street Shooting… it was actually a driveway!

There were only a couple more photo opportunities at the top of the hill.

 

I’m almost home now. This the intersection that you turn into Bing Cherry Lane, which is the cul-de-sac that I live on. Our house is to the left of the house on the left in this photo.

Before I end my walk, I have to go to the end of the cul-de-sac and then come back to the house.

The Purple Sage looks great this year, and this was the only time I passed them when the sun wasn’t out.

I don’t think this one is a Purple Sage, but the sun wasn’t blasting it with hard light, so I took this photo.

Before I ended my walk, I wanted to make sure that I had at least one shot where the aperture was wide open at f/1.8 so that I could see how what kind of “bokeh” that this lens would produce on the Micro Four-Thirds sensor in this new Olympus OM-D E-M5.

I was pleased to see that I could achieve this sort of effect – one that I really enjoy producing with my full-frame Canon 5D Mk II.

Well, here’s where my journey ends.

I didn’t get the “exercise benefit” that I always get from this 3 mile walk. Even so, I was very excited when I was done – mainly because I was pretty confident that I could take this new camera on our vacation and still not wish that I had brought my “real camera” with me.

At ISO 200, the images look great to me. I had the camera set to capture both JPG and RAW simultaneously – mainly because Adobe had not officially released the updates to Lightroom 4.1 and Camera Raw 7.1 that I would need to process the RAW files with.

While on vacation in Ruidoso, New Mexico, Adobe did release those updates, and I spent the morning of May 31st going through these photos and putting this post together. In ALL of the photos in this post, the White Balance was left at “As Shot” (the camera was on Auto White Balance). The Exposure, Contrast, Highlights, Shadows, Whites, and Blacks sliders were all left at 0 (zero). ALL of the photo did have the Clarity slider set to +20, the Vibrance slider set to +8, and the Saturation slider set to 0 (zero).

Why the bump in Clarity and Vibrance? Because that’s just the way I post process all of my RAW files, except for portraits of women (where I leave the Clarity slider at 0 (zero) – and then use the Adjustment Brush to reduce the Clarity on just their facial skin to -50).

When I exported the JPG photos that you see here from Lightroom 4.1 they were reduced in size to 1000 pixels along the long edge, which is quite a bit less than the 4608 pixels that the camera captured. This inevitably results in a loss of resolution. Even so, I think you will agree with me that what you see here isn’t too shabby!

My next few posts will be to show some of the photos that I took this week – all of which were taken with my new Olympus OM-D E-M5 camera and the three lenses that I currently have.