Olympus Camera Settings for Birds in Flight | I Wish I'd Known This Setting Before

for my number one tip for this which i cannot believe that i haven't used before hey everyone thank you so much for joining me again today i'm gonna be photographing some birds in flight again and uh i'm gonna go over my settings on my em-1x so a lot of the settings will be the same for the year one series but there's a couple of things i think i think you may not be able to set but stick around you might get something out of this i'm really excited about this one feature that i can't believe that i haven't used until now it's just not been really been on my radar i know it's not the bird auto tracking but stay tuned and we'll go over that as well now if you don't want to stick around for the whole video you can and i'll put the chapter links at the bottom so you can kind of just jump to the ones that interest you i will be taking hopefully i will be taking some photos of the birds here as well i've got all my settings ready to go so if anything looks like it's gonna fly by we'll stop for some photos it doesn't seem to be anything going on here right now so let's dive into the menu and we'll go over the settings that are kind of deep into the menu system first and a lot of these i will use default anyway they're just always on um so i'll go over them now just in case you have something different and just you know this isn't like the ultimate guide or anything like that this isn't a must for how to photograph birds in flight i'm just going over what's been working for me and you know there's definitely been some changes on the way i've tried out things over long periods of time and then all of a sudden you know figured out something new that works and i've changed it to that so let's just dive into this and for this we'll go into the cog on the menu system and into a1 so the a is all about focus which we'll go down to af scanner first i just always have that on mode three and that just means that it's going to continuously scan if it doesn't have focus on something the second one here has to do with the continuous autofocus sensitivity i'm usually in continuous autofocus but every now and then i add on the tracking as well but for the sensitivity my default is plus two and especially when i'm in a situation like this where there is a chance that the birds might actually fly towards me and plus two just means that the it's gonna be very sensitive so as the bird is approaching me fast it's gonna have the most opportunity to you know keep updating the focus so that i get the best focus as it's approaching me so that's always a plus two for me except for when sometimes actually i'll show you a little footage of this i was sitting on the other side here more towards evenings i had the sun on the other side so i just wanted to show you guys a setup where i have right here you can see here some little branches and things like that that's sticking out here or even going into me here um and this is where i would set sensitivity down to minus two and that means that if i'm tracking a bird i'm following it in flight and these branches here get in front of my view then ideally it doesn't catch it if it's a minus two it obviously depends how slow you go you know if you pan really slowly and it has enough time it will catch that branch eventually but putting in a minus two gives you the most amount of chance that it's kind of sticky it sticks to the bird instead of catching really quickly other obstacles that are in the way so sitting in a place like this where there are obstacles in between me and the birds in flight then that's where i'm gonna go to minus two uh and now that pretty much all other times i will go to plus two because i want it to be sensitive especially if there's a chance that the birds can fly towards me because i want that autofocus to keep updating really quickly so i get you know i get focused on the bird as it's approaching me for the next two settings we have on the menu we go down on the a one uh menu and we get to continuous autofocus center start so if it's going to take priority in the middle when you start focusing and the next one is kind of similar if it's going to prioritize the center point and you can go in here and you can tick the boxes for all the different ways you can configure your focus points so for both of these i will only take the box that has one in the middle and four on the outside that's the only time i want to prioritize the middle because when i choose other things like a grid or something like that i use the five by five the focus point great a lot of the time but when i use that i don't want to prioritize the middle i want it to focus equally over the whole five by five that's why i'm using it so the only box that i will take is with five points and emphasis in the middle one okay so let's dive into a2 for the mode settings that we just talked about the different focus points i like to keep that quite simple so that when i'm in the field and i want to change my focus points i don't want to have too many to choose between and you can go in here on a2 and you can choose the mode settings you can choose how many you want available to you so i actually only have three ticked here but there's also a default that you have to have picked so i only have one single in the middle i have the five points which is gonna now gonna have emphasis on the middle one and then i have a five by five grid and that's it because that means that i can cycle through really quickly when i wanna change one of those for the af area pointer this is a really specific two birds in flight but i quite like to have that on too it means that when i acquire focus a green and a square comes over where the focus point is now if you have it on on one that focus that green square will just disappear if you have it on two it'll just continuously be there and it'll just show me that i still have focus on where my focus point is so i really like to have that available to me so next one we'll dive into a3 and obviously here i will keep the tracking subject on the bird i don't always use the tracking in fact i'm using it less and less but we'll go over that in a little bit but obviously i keep it always on bird because that's what i'm going to be photographing so one more thing in the menu system that i want to go over and that is c1 and it is continuous autofocus release priority i'm always like i said i'm always in continuous autofocus i never actually use a single autofocus point because i'm using back button focus so i have a video on back button focus you're going to check that out but there are a lot of benefits of photographing with back button focus anyways for the continuous autofocus release priority i turn that off that just means that i won't waste loads of frames by taking shots when when i'm not in focus it's not 100 and i will i still see i get shots that are out of focus but you know it does it will stop you from just firing away when you're definitely not in focus okay so that's most of the kind of behind the scenes or deep in the menu system changes that i make um or that i have made and they're always my default now i hardly ever change it for other types of photography now then let's go over let's go back out to the super control panel and we'll talk about more of the common settings for what i use for the shooting mode i like to have a low sequential and i always use electronic shutter so that i never have a sound on when i'm actually pressing the shutter button and that just really helps you know whenever i'm photographing wildlife and you know the wildlife never even know that i'm there sometimes because it's not making a sound so that's always on the electronic shutter for me now when it comes to frames per second you can set that in the in the menu system but i keep mine to default of nine frames per second now this might be a little bit slow for some people but because i don't like to change my settings a lot of time i like to keep that mode on all the time nine frames per second just means that if i'm really careful i can just about you know squeeze the trigger very gently and i can take one frame and that just really helps me it means that i'll never have to you know waste frames if i just want to take one shot or anything like that so nine frames per second is just that sweet spot for me it might be different for you but you just got to test it out and see so when i'm doing kind of opportunistically flight shot like this i just keep it as a default but if i'm expecting a really good image or i have a very good situation i will go ahead and change that and i'll just you know bump it to the max which is 18 frames per second i don't use the high um the high burst mode because then it won't continuously autofocus in between frames whatever you focus on first comes into focus and you start shooting that that's where the focus point is so you know you can take 60 frames per second but your focus point there stays the same so i only use that for pro capture and i will use obviously i will use pro capture sometimes for birds in flight so i do have a video on how to set that up specifically for birds in flight when i use the low pro capture when i use high so go check that out if you're interested i'll put a link up here i should say i'm in manual mode if you don't like being in full manual mode then i suggest shutter speed priority it's going to be fine i like manual mode because it you're getting it once you get used to it you can quickly change the settings for the situation the problem with semi-automatic modes like shutter speed priority is that if the surroundings maybe the background changes from dark to bright the camera is going to get full and you're going to get a highly varied exposure if i have a white bird here if you have a darker background it could easily get overexposed because it's going to take into account the background a lot of time and then vice versa i'm on a bright background a dark bird you know i might under expose so if you're using shutter speed priority really learn to use the exposure compensation now i have my uh camera on the emux e m1x setup maybe quite weirdly for a lot of people but i actually have my two dials priority on iso and shutter speed and that just helps me out it helps me out change my exposure quicker so usually the default for most people for most cameras is you push a button and then you get access to the iso but i find it a lot faster in the field to change my exposure with direct access to iso and shutter speed because when i want to change my f-stop it's very conscious decision i want to increase my depth of field for to achieve more focus so i don't mind pressing an extra button for changing my f-stop because i do that less regularly than i change my iso i will change my exposure using my iso more often so hope that makes sense now if you are curious about exactly how i lay out my all my buttons and dials and everything on my olympus then i'll put a link and you can go to my website and i'll give you access to a video there i'm not going to put it normally on as i do normally on youtube this is more specifically interesting for people who are interested in how i set up all the settings for my e1x and olympus cameras so i'll put a link below and you can check that out on my website if you are interested and on there i'll go through i'll go through the entire way i've set up a m1x for wildlife photography so four birds flight as i said i'm in full manual and my usual default is starting with something like 1600 shutter speed uh my lowest f-stop which is f4 right now i'm at the moment i'm shooting with the 4150 2.8 but i have an extender 1.4 on it as well to give me a bit extra reach at the moment i'm also an f 5.6 so when there's available light i will put my f-stop up a little bit to increase the depth of field and it makes it easier to capture birds in flight sharp so if you have available light i will bump up my f-stop a little bit and that really helps because very often i'll have like a group of birds or something like flying together and i want to at least try to get you know all of them sharp ideally that heart you know that doesn't always work you need quite a bit of light for that quite a bit of depth of field but it gives me more of a chance to capture it anyways because when you're photographing birds in flight it's very easy to catch focus on the wings or anything else and the eye becomes out of focus and as i said for shutter speed i like the default 1600 but it all depends on what kind of birds you have you know for small fast birds you want to be up at 3 200th of a second or even faster for larger raptor soaring you know you might not even need more than 500 of a second if you want more tips on photographing birds in flight i have a video on that already so go check that out if you want more tips on how to photograph birds in flight now for my image stabilization for this and my my default setting for that it's just image stabilization auto and for birds in flight like this i keep it on it you could turn it off you don't exactly need image stabilization for birds in flight but i like to steady the aim because it gets a little bit shaky especially if you have a very long focal length so i quite like to have the image stabilization on so it just helps me steady and it helps me compose the image i don't mind keeping that on when i want to change it off and take something different like panning images that's when i will go in and i will change it to vertical shake so that's uh is-2 on this one so that just means that my camera will only correct for up and down movements but won't correct for the horizontal panning movement because i want that blur in the background but i did a video on this last week so go check that out if you want some tips on how to take panning images of birds in flight i think it's a really fun way to photograph because it just creates something very different and unique a lot of the time so it's definitely worth exploring that so go check that out i'll put a link to it here my default for the focus grid is a five by five now i mentioned in last week in the video that i will use uh bird tracking quite a bit can be good sometimes but this last week i've experimented a lot more with photographing birds in flight and i found that it just failed me more times than not i got better results when i put on a 5x5 grid and i use continuous autofocus now i actually used to use just one point in the middle or one surrounded by four um and i do think that sometimes you do need to have that as well and that is when it gets really busy backgrounds and you know your camera is just going to keep chasing it just jumps from the back on and forth and those situations definitely worth the try the bird tracking because i do sometimes find that that can be a good feature but because it's let me download the times i don't use it as a default but i have a preset on it and on the m1x you know i have my preset just on the back here so instantly it changes to that anyway so 5x5 grid is now my default if it gets busy if i'm not successful with that i'll change and i'll flick through the ones i have available to me and i'll change it to either a single point in the middle or one surrounded by four and the way i have a quick change for that is um pushing this joystick in and then dialing on the back and that's you know so it can get a little bit tricky because uh it's very easy to to actually you know to lean a little bit on the joystick and i kind of go sideways so that it moves but once you get the hang of it holding that in and then dialing around it's fairly easy and it's really quickly you know you do it without moving around too much on your camera really quickly by just dialing in the back here and holding my thumb on that joystick now though for my number one tip for this which i cannot believe that i haven't used before and i really should have known about these ages ago and taking more advantage of it so on a lot of lenses i don't have it on this lens but i have it on my 300 there's an autofocus limiter but i've always found it to be you know it's good but for birds in flight it doesn't quite work because there's one feature that it has missing and it's not customizable but in the camera we have an autofocus limiter range that you can set yourself so i don't know if many people may know this many people use it already probably maybe i'm just a little bit slow to the game this to me is the biggest game changer for photographing birds in flight on the olympus system so for me here i go into it is in the cog again it is an a3 and it's af limiter so you go right again and then you go on now here you can set distance settings and like the the one you often get on your lens there are actually three different settings you can have on that now for me i like to keep it simple i don't like to mess around with three different settings i don't need that i need one and the one i need is i want to be able to close focus as close to me as possible and then i just want to have a limit on the background so for me here now that just helps i can set that background so that my camera won't even it won't be able to focus on the background because it's too far away so this what you set here depends on the day you're shooting but you can do a little bit of experimentation before you actually start shooting and you can figure out exactly how far away the background is and you can set a distance that's before that that's way before that and what you can also do with this is that a lot of times you know you might be a little bit trigger happy and you take photos when the birds are actually flying far away and they're never going to be any good anyways because they're going to be so tiny in the frame so unless you have something else to really complement that complements them with amazing mountains or great light or something like that usually not great so in this situation as well a focus limiter can just help you save yourselves those shots so what i have is set up here for now my background is quite far away so i've set mine from 0 to 250 and that just means that my camera won't focus on anything that's further away than 250. now if you want close-ups of birds in flight you know then you could go down to way closer than that you could set it to 100 you could set the 50 meters you could do whatever you want and that can really help if you have a busy background but you know how far away that is then you know you can set in a range there so you're just not going to focus on the background and that is really going to help out with acquiring focus on the bird and not for the focus to just go all over the place so what i also want to do after i've done that is i go down to b1 into button function and i assign one of my buttons to instantly to activate that autofocus limiter that's why i like just have one limiter because if not you have to hold in that button and then dial in the specific one you need but when you only have one of them it's just a push of that button and that autofocus limiter is activated so for me i go into b1 button function and i have it set up to my iso here because they said i don't use that button like i said every now and then i will try bird tracking as well because i do think there are times when that isn't superior it does it can give some good results but a lot of time it does fail me so my default is to not use it and i'll experiment with it if it works well for a situation i'll leave it on but if not i won't use it i'd love to hear how you guys are getting on with photographing birds in flight do you use bird tracking and have you tried autofocus limiter and just you know just make sure that you never focus on the background love to hear from you and you know go check out some of these other videos i have on photographing birds and flight i'll put uh links in the description below and if you're interested in how i set up my entire you know how i set up my olympus then you know follow the link to my website and you can get access to the video there thank you guys so much for watching see you next week

Channel: Espen Helland

Views: 25,371

Keywords: espen helland, wildlife photography, bird photography, photography, nature photography, olympus, wildlife, nature, birds, photographing birds, bird photography tips and tricks, bird photography tips, wildlife photography tips, photography tips, learn bird photography, omd, em1x, olympus settings for bird photography, olympus settings, olympus camera settings, photography wildlife, bird photography techniques, nature photographer, olympus omd, camera, olympus em1x, olympus e-m1x, mft

Id: vdF6a9LInNU

Length: 19min 48sec (1188 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 24 2021