More About Settings - Olympus XZ-1 Tips And Tricks Manual

XZ-1 Tips page 3 of 29
Sunset -- point the spot focus to the sky at the left or right of the setting sun; watch the
LCD screen til you see the effect you like.
Water reflections -- spot focus off the reflection in the water, not the sky.
Portraits -- here's an exception to Program mode. Go to A Aperture instead. Turn the lens
ring til it says 1.8 Put the lens at full telephoto. Stand about 6 feet away from the subject.
The background behind the person should be nicely blurred. Now, if you are doing this in
bright daylight, there may be too much light for the XZ-1 to handle. So go into the OK
button menu, and change ND Off to on. The built-in Neutral Density filter lets you take
pictures at wide open lens settings in bright daylight.
Filters -- Don't bother. You can do any special effects later in Photoshop -- almost
anything except a true polarizing effect, and the Vivid settings above will help you avoid
the need for polarizing color saturation.
Street scenes -- if you have time, think ahead, about what kind of picture may present
itself in the minutes ahead. Or what kind of picture you missed may repeat itself... and
when... and be there. This is hard to do!

More about settings

I leave my XZ-1 set on Underwater color balance (little fish icon) -- A=0, G=-1, and
Vivid color mode. EV at -0.3 or 0.7... digital's like old slide film, you want to
underexpose a bit to get rich saturated color.
I keep my Custom mode set to Program, with Monotone color mode (Black-and-white)...
sometimes I like to 'see' in B&W.
If using Aperture mode, I like f/5.6 as a place where the lens is very sharp with
tremendous depth-of-field. And f/2.5, at full 112mm tele, if you want to blur the
background. Really bright day? Use the ND filter to stop overexposure. Shutter speed --
at least 1/125 sec to stop motion. Or, 1/25 sec if you want to get a controlled blur, like