Farming photography

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
Several tips for Olympus cameras, or for the ones I'm familiar with.
If you are a jpeg shooter, which is required for many of the modes [you can shoot raw and post process or shoot both raw and jpeg together, your car has sufficient capacity] then you probably need to enable jpeg Large Super-fine in the menu for the best quality images. By default this is switched off for no reason that anyone has ever found and therefore hidden from the shooting options. Once switched on it is found as an available option in the fast menu, whether the super control panel or first page of the deep menu screen.

Then I find that you need to switch 'keep warm colours' to off, which is found in the cog menu page G on mine. Having done that I adjust the EVF Adjust [cog page I] Auto illuminance to off and personally I like the temperature to +1 and brightness to -1.
 

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
A few suggestions for E-M10Mkii owners that are probably good for all other variants, although the position in the menu system may differ.

If the cog menu display doesn’t show, you can switch it on in the spanner section of the menu. Or off of course should you lend your camera to someone who might mess about with your configuration. The cog menu is mainly for configurations that set the camera to how you like to use it, rather than settings you would commonly change while actually taking pictures.
The latter should be set using the dials and buttons and the Super Control Panel, accessed by pressing the centre ‘OK’ button. There are two alternative views for this panel, accessed by pressing the OK button more than once.

In cog J my favoured viewfinder style is 3

Further down the list in J is EVF Auto-switch, which after long use in ‘on’ I’ve decided is best switched to ‘off’. The viewfinder is easily switched manually between LCD and back using the switch on the right of it. The reason I prefer manual use if because when carrying on a strap, the auto setting stops the camera from sleeping to conserve the battery, because against the chest of leg it assumes the camera is in use due to proximity.
You can also do this easier by long-pressing the viewfinder switch and selecting on or off. A short press toggles the screens.


Hidden way down in the D cog menu, on the third page of D, are your battery-saver modes, as well as giving you the ability to choose peaking settings for manual focussing [I use red at high intensity]. For battery saving I set LCD to fade at 8 seconds. Camera to sleep at 3 minutes. To auto power-off at 30 minutes. With these setting you never need worry about leaving the camera switched on and, apart from after 30 minute shut-down, a half press of the shutter button wakes it instantly. After powering down automatically the camera is restarted by turning the main switch to off and back on. Set your intervals to suit yourself. While getting to know the camera, a longer interval is probably more suitable, otherwise it goes to sleep while head-scratching is going on.

It took me a long time to figure out that the auto switching between screen and viewfinder was preventing the camera from sleeping while I was out shooting and quite a bit of thought to find the above settings. Especially the settings deep in cogD.
 

Cowabunga

Member
Location
Ceredigion,Wales
As for dial settings, my personal preference on all cameras of all brands where applicable, is to have the front alter either shutter speed or aperture, depending on whether S or A mode is used. The rear dial I set to Exposure Value Compensation [to alter the brightness of the image]. The camera always meters to a mid grey, so, counterintuitively, when photographing snow you need to make the picture brighter while the inside of a black upholstered cars needs making darker with a negative compensation. Otherwise the snow and the black seats and dash will be rendered more or less a similar shade of grey.

If this is teaching granny to suck eggs, sorry, but I know that there are very many people that did not know this and may even doubt it. Go and try it when you can.
I tend to use A mode for most of my shooting by the way. I’ve just set my cameras [specifically the E-M1 MkII and Sony A7III] to have a minimum shutter speed of 150th when using autoISO for tomorrow’s anticipated ‘street photography’ where there will be many people moving. If the light is good enough I’ll be increasing that to 250th of a second to totally freeze motion. Depending on the camera used, these setting can be saved to a Custom mode on the main dial [or ‘Myset’ on some older Olympus models] for instant recall when similar circumstances occur again.

This cannot be set in that way on my E-M10 MkII, so I have to use S mode and set it to 160th or higher manually…. not a problem. What would be a problem was if I had used another mode and the shutter automatically chose 1/60th and everyone came out blurred in the photos due to their movement.
The image stabilisation on Olympus is superb, but it won’t be effective for subjects that are moving, only for an unsteady shooter holding the camera at a slow shutter speed.

Hope that helps someone.
 
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SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

  • 0 %

    Votes: 79 42.9%
  • Up to 25%

    Votes: 63 34.2%
  • 25-50%

    Votes: 30 16.3%
  • 50-75%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 75-100%

    Votes: 3 1.6%
  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

    Votes: 6 3.3%

Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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