The OM-1’s Highlight/Shadow blinkie system shows the exposure state directly on the bird rather than giving a histogram average of the whole scene, making it possible to spin the rear dial to ETTR while maintaining focus lock, faster than any spot metering approach. I set the function lever in position 1 with exposure compensation on the rear dial as default, so adjusting the exposure on a flying bird requires no mode switching at all.
These are my full custom settings, cheat sheets, and downloadable .set files for birds in flight on the OM-1 Mk I and Mk II, built around manual mode with auto ISO, highlight/shadow blinkies, and back-button focus — oriented towards the most demanding scenarios including white birds against dark backgrounds and rapidly changing light. The core principle is that matrix metering fails with high-contrast birds; the blinkie system combined with instant exposure compensation via the rear dial gets reliably better results.
My birds-in-flight hit rate from a Cape Town session in March 2024 was measurably better than previous trips — a change I attribute to the OM-1’s ProCapture mode, which buffers frames before the shutter is fully pressed and eliminates the half-second reaction-time gap that costs shots. The camera does its most useful work in the moments before you consciously decide to press the button.
Returning to Noordhoek in Cape Town after five years away, I produced the best seascape results of my career — mostly because post-processing has advanced further than camera technology for this genre, and I now plan each image as a 2- to 3-layer composite before shooting it. The critical skill is knowing which shutter speed serves which role: 2 minutes for misty-water simplification, 1/5 second for visible water streaks, 1/8000 second for freezing wave impact.
Over two days at the Hawk Conservancy Trust with over 6,000 test shots, the OM-1 achieved 75% focus accuracy in the morning session and 81% in the demanding afternoon session — versus 63% and 39% respectively for the Sony A9 with the 200-600mm, and 61%/45% for the EM1x. The afternoon advantage is the key result: in situations requiring instant focus acquisition on suddenly appearing birds, the lighter OM-1 and 300mm f4 snapped to focus within 2–3 frames while the heavier Sony system frequently missed the window entirely.
On1 Photo Raw 2022 no longer functions as a Lightroom plugin, and its .ON1 and .ONPHOTO sidecar files are invisible to Lightroom — so keeping the two programs in sync requires a specific file management approach. The workflow I use starts in On1 for culling, denoising, layers, and dynamic contrast, exports as DNG, copies all sidecar files into the Lightroom directory structure, and imports into Lightroom only for final metadata and keyword management.
The Nikon Z7 has no exposure timer, no live feedback during long exposures, and requires 39 dial clicks to switch from a test shutter speed to bulb mode — three failures that make it extraordinarily frustrating for long exposure work. The OM-1 reaches bulb mode in one dial click, shows a live histogram during the exposure, and in my dark-frame noise tests at ISO 200 equalled or outperformed the Z7 at its base ISO of 64 across exposures of 2, 4, and 6 minutes.
Dark-frame noise tests at 2, 4, and 6-minute exposures showed the OM-1 at ISO 200 producing clean results while the Nikon Z7 at its base ISO of 64 showed luminance spots at 4 minutes and colour noise at 6 minutes. This means the OM-1 needs no in-camera noise reduction for long exposures of this length — halving the time required for every shot compared to older Olympus cameras where NR was essential.
The conventional argument against Olympus for birds in flight is sensor noise — but the 1.3-stop sensor disadvantage is cancelled by the 1.3–2-stop lens speed advantage of the OM pro telephoto lenses over the Sony 200-600mm at equivalent focal lengths. Focus accuracy testing confirmed this: in challenging afternoon sessions requiring instant acquisition on erratically moving birds, the EM1x matched or outperformed every Sony system tested, and the OM system’s substantially lower inertia made the difference in shots requiring rapid tracking.
The standard workflow of importing 200+ keeper images into Lightroom first and then passing them to specialist tools falls apart at scale — the process is too slow and the round-trips between programs compound badly. The workflow I now use reverses the order: cull in FastRawViewer, batch denoise in DxO Photolab (200 images in around 10 minutes), process in On1 for dynamic contrast and resizing, and import into Lightroom only at the end for metadata and final culling.
Testing 11,467 shots of Gannets at Bempton Cliffs over two days, the 1.4x teleconverter on the 40-150mm f2.8 caused almost no accuracy penalty — 73% hit rate versus 74% without it, a result that means the 1.4TC can stay on permanently. The same 1.4TC on the 300mm f4 halved the hit rate from 78% to 39%, and a 5-stop reduction in ambient light dropped the 300mm’s solo accuracy from 78% to 60%.
At Bempton Cliffs using ProCapture L and Bird AI tracking together, I took 4,382 shots of Gannets landing in 61 minutes with a 76% focus hit rate — and 12% of those in-focus shots were portfolio-quality landing captures, a result I had never come close to achieving in previous trips without ProCapture. The pre-capture buffer captures the frames before your finger fully presses the shutter, which is the only way to reliably catch a Gannet at the exact moment it drops its feet.
