I was bewildered. I was using my Olympus 40-150 Pro zoom and wanted to shoot at f/2.8 It was a dull day. But the lens wouldn’t open up to f/2.8. No matter what I did, it maxed at f/4. I was using Aperture Priority mode with all my bog standard settings for everyday work. My standard settings have the G9 start up set to f/4, raw+jpg, single point focus, single shot. The shooting mode was as always aperture priority. Except the G9’s aperture priority didn’t stretch to letting me set f/2.8. What the…?

A look at the Info screen brings up all the main shooting settings. I couldn’t see of anything untoward. It wasn’t set to HDR or Bracketing or anything that might have some obscure or undocumented side effect. I get emails sometimes from photographers who simply can’t set a 1 second shutter speed with a Panasonic. That’s easy. If you’re using 3200 ISO, the longest speed available is 1/2 sec. And at 6400, it’s 1/4 sec. It is documented, but sketchily. I know about the limitation because I’ve written books on the Panasonics. But what I didn’t know and no amount of manual perusal or menu gazing told me was – WHY CAN’T I GET ****ING F/2.8.

Since I wasn’t getting anything done, I made do with f/4 and got some pix. I then put it all in my bag and made my way home. When I get back from some pic taking, I like to give my gear the once over with a cloth and stow it all neatly, so the next time I go out I can pick up the bag and know that everything is present, correct and in working order (except, maybe, me). It’s an old habit and a professional necessity when you are in a job where a phone call at 5am can have you, bleary-eyed, on an 8.30am flight to wherever the editor’s fancy takes you.

Old habits die hard and I wanted to sort out the lack of f/2.8 on my 40-150 before I used it or the G9 again. Maybe Olympus had been listening to the FF equivalence OCD sufferers and had updated the firmware via Wi-Fi overnight so that f/4 was the new f/2.8 for Micro Four Thirds users. Probably not, because it ought to be f5/6. Apparently. Unless Olympus had agreed a compromise with its OCD critics. “Ok, guys, we say the lens is f/2.8, you say it is f/5.6. How about we compromise on f/4?”

But no. As I reached down to pick up the lens from the bag I noticed…it had the teleconverter fitted! Which made the lens a 210mm f/4. So sorting out the problem was quite easy, just take off the teleconverter. The trouble was, I needed to have sorted it out on the shoot and I hadn’t had the nous to do so. Luckily I had resisted the temptation to get my expensive f/4 lens to open up to f/2.8 by forcing the aperture ring past the stop. Violence can be very effective but with a £1200 lens, not really.

I don’t imagine I’m alone in this. You want to do something perfectly simple and you can’t. You press the shutter button and nothing happens. The camera is set to prioritise focus, so it won’t take a picture if it will be out of fuzzy. You may be photographing a flower and your lens won’t focus that close. So it does what it is told under such circumstances. Nothing. But do you remember setting that, among the other maybe 200 settings in the menu? Or how about my favourite. The lens won’t focus. I check everything. It all looks normal. The focus lever is set to AFS. I keep trying but nothing happens. I go the Info screen. AFS, it says. Then f***ing focus, you moron! Maybe the lens is malfunctioning. I go to take it off. It is an Olympus lens. The focus ring is pulled back, forcing manual focus. Look, there are the depth of field markings that I have never, ever found any use for. The last time I found I couldn’t get autofocus, I swore I’d remember to check the ring. Except I’ve been in and out of the menus changing settings and changed lenses so often since that it quite slipped my mind.

I do have a serious point here. With the plethora of configuration changes possible with Micro Four Thirds cameras, it is difficult to come up with a perfect combination for a shoot. If you are shooting fast-moving action using back button focusing, do you prefer that the shutter should release on the half push, giving you a hair-trigger action? The only way to find out is to try it. However, trying it for a few shots is like taking a test drive in a car, it is enough see if you like it but not enough to evaluate it. If you want to really nail the best settings for you to cover a motor race, say, you are going to have to cover many, many races to find out what you really do find the most effective in practice. Take auto ISO. Should you limit it to 3200? Or let it range all the way up to 12,800? You’ll only really know when you have a shot at 12,800 that needs cropping a bit. Is it too noisy? Would a better choice have been to limit ISO to 3200 and put up with a little blur? You need to see what happens over a broad range of pictures before you will be sure in your own mind.

All this experimentation takes a long time. You will inevitably miss pictures while looking for that ideal setup and each setup for portraits or birds or macro needs be done separately, multiplying the time taken to get your perfect camera. It’s all a bit unsatisfactory. I find it a bit like modern newspapers. They are so fat with reading matter there that you know you’ll never have time to get through it all. It generates what is now called FOMO, Fear of missing out. It’s unsettling enough that I now rarely buy a newspaper because I feel a pressure to read it all. With cameras, it is similar. Lets say I work up a good setup for photographing night-time cityscapes. I’m happy enough with it and the results I get. But there’s always a nagging, if background, uncertainty. Is there something I have missed? If there is would my picture have been better?

In the end, I wonder if all that choice and complexity is really making our photographic lives better? Or is it driving us into WMS – Washing Machine Syndrome. There are 14 or more programs to get a perfect wash for any load, cotton, coloured, what have you. There is also one that says ‘Normal Wash’. That’s the one everyone uses.

With my cameras, I find a basic setup and use it all the time, altering as few things as possible to suit the task in hand. I always shoot raw+jpg, for example. That way, I can’t miss out. If I want the fastest sequence, I just change to jpg only. My standard setup is not perfect for anything but it works fine for everything with sensible adjustments where needed. To give a negative example, I do like the feel of the shutter firing with a half press. Very slick and occasionally useful. I never do use it, though, because I just know I’ll forget I set it, pull the camera from the bag and shoot at the merest touch of the button, too soon and missing the best shot.

Camera makers add complexity on complexity to digital cameras. A lot of it is done in firmware, so adding features is cheap as well as being good marketing. But when I look at some of the settings available in the menus, I wonder whether anyone ever uses them. It’s because of the ever increasing list of options that my favourite Micro Four Thirds innovation in the past year or two has been Panasonic’s My Menu. I put every setting I change in there, in alphabetical order.

It isn’t where I find my most used items – it’s where I don’t find the rest.