My New Olympus E-PL1 PEN

I am brand new to this site but I was looking around the message board and felt the people on here are very well informed and I am a beginner. So, I have a couple of questions for your brainy photographers :p

I just purchased an Olympus E-PL1 today from best buy and I'm so excited! The main things I will be using this camera for is sporting events, pictures with friends and recording videos!

I viewed almost every video youtube has to offer but I'm still not getting it! My brother has a baseball game tomorrow and I want to go prepared. I can't figure out how to set the camera to capture fast action events. I tried the live mode function and going to express motion but even when i set it to "stop motion" my images are blurry! I need help with that!

Also, I am going to a basketball game indoors soon, what would be the best setting for the best pictures? Thank you for all your help in advanced! :)

Hello and welcome!

There are a few ways to get good results. You might want to put it in full auto and snap away - it may not yield the very best results, but I think it will do just fine. Full auto is a nice option because it doesn't have much of a learning curve, just point and shoot.

If you're looking for a little more power and understanding, you have to start by understanding the basics of exposure: Light, aperture, shutter speed, and ISO. Once you have a working knowledge of these, it's just a matter of practice makes perfect. There's a nice thread in the nature and wildlife forum that explains how these things interplay - start there.

To shoot a baseball game with a camera I've never used before, I'd start by putting it in "A" mode. That mode sets the shutter speed automatically once you set the ISO and the aperture. I'd set the aperture as wide as it gets (lower f/number is a wider aperture) and set the ISO to 400. That will allow the camera to use a high shutter speed to freeze the action, and will also give you fairly "clean" results without a lot of graininess.

What these settings do are:

a wide aperture allows the most light into the camera, which means that the exposure can be shorter (faster shutter speed).

ISO400 is a relatively "fast" ISO and allows less light to cause more exposure, resulting in a faster shutter speed.

"A" mode will allow you to point and shoot without worrying too much about using an alien camera.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, but hopefully you can get some good usable results At This Very Moment so that you won't be discouraged. The m4/3 cameras are powerful tools but just like all tools, you'll need a little knowledge to use them to their potential.

400 is not going to be fast enough. You're going to want shutter speeds of 1/250 or faster to even have a chance of stopping motion in a sports game. Pen cameras have good high ISO performance, you can bump it up to 1600 or even 3200.

if this is all gibberish to you, then you've got a lot of catching up to do before you can really use the camera to its potential. Sure these m4/3 cameras are capable of AWESOME performance in a camera thats the size of a pocket camera, but you still need to work for it. Keeping it in auto really limits the creative potential.


If you want my advice, learn what Shutter Speed, Aperture, and ISO are and how manipulating the three settings will affect the image. Dont even touch any other settings before having a good grasp what all of these are.