Auto Bracketing using Custom Mode on Olympus Cameras

I want to start this by saying I’m not an overly techie person. If you came here for an overly techie answer this won’t be the place. If you came here looking for a solution that just works please read on.

Custom Mode…umm what?

Custom mode (Mysets) on Olympus cameras are powerful ways to save a quick setting for your camera. On the Pen F you have 4 custom settings on the top menu dial (C1, C2, C3, C4). You can set these to anything you like. This is something that can be very overwhelming when you are learning your camera. With a little time spent getting to know your camera the custom modes can become your new BFF.  My C1 is a custom black and white setting that I like to do street shooting with. My C2 is the reason for this blog post. I have C2 setup for an auto bracketing solution.

One thing I had a hard time when I switched from Nikon to Olympus was the fact that bracketing was not a one button setup. It’s a little hidden in the menu system and then you have to manually press the shutter for every shot. It might seem lazy to not to want to click the button every shot but it can throw your shot out of alignment slightly. Slight alignments can be easily corrected in Lightroom but why go through all the hassle? This setup has helped me love to bracketing again.

Bracketing

Bracketing is great for landscapes or high contrast situations. It takes a set amount of pictures (I usually do 3) and takes an underexposed, a properly exposed, and an overexposed shot. This allows the camera to see all the shadows and all the highlights in a scene. Every OMD camera can be set up to shoot brackets but I took mine a step further and set up a custom bracketing solution. This is my setup on the PenF but will work on any OMD camera that you can set a custom mode for.

Here are the step by step directions of how I set up my bracketing custom preset.
pictures of menus taken with iPhone – like I said non techie…😆

1. Turn on camera
   
2. I put mine in Aperture mode and set it F8 – this means a lot of the frame will be in focus
3. Hit the menu button and go into 2 menu
   
4. Go to Bracketing and go down to “on”
5. Use right trackpad to go into “AE BKT”
6. I use 3F 1.OEV which means I shoot 3 pictures with 1 stop in between them
   
7. Hit OK
8. Make sure that when you get back to the bracketing menu you hit OK to turn it on
9. Back out of the menu and enter the Super control Panel by hitting OK
10. Go the the shooting menu and scroll over to Custom Self Timer
11. Hit the info button
12. Change it to 1 s start time – 3 shots .5 seconds in between and auto focus every frame off
    
13. Now you can take a bracketed shot without pushing the shutter button three times
14. To make this easy to access you want to set this as a custom setting
15. Go to menu
16. 1 menu
17. Set/Custom Modes
18. Assign to Custom Mode
19. Use right track pad and set it to which one you would like C1-4 (mine is 2)
    
20. Hit Okay and now every time you use that C2 menu you should have it set to automatically proceed through the bracketed shots
    

This should take less than 5 minutes to setup if you are not that familiar with the Olympus menu. If you know the menu it should be a pretty quick process.  

If you have any questions or comments please let me know. If there are things on your Olympus camera that puzzles you let me know and if I know how to help you I will do a blog post.