I was quite taken aback by the amount of mail I got after I posted an easy way of getting a clutter free screen on the Olympus E-M1 Mark III on YouTube. It seems that there are many photographers out there who appreciate a bit of minimalism in the midst of the technical tour de force of the digital camera.

I’m a great fan of the Custom settings on our cameras. Great to set up a whole set of parameters and have them to hand at any time. Trouble is, it doesn’t simplify things as much as I would hope because I often find I want to change something from the recorded setup, The trouble with Custom settings was that any alterations you made were lost when the camera went to sleep. You’d be out looking for fast moving cyclists and up the ISO to 1600. Not much happening so the camera goes to sleep. Cyclist appears, you touch the shutter button and the camera wakes. And the ISO is reset to 200. One blurred cyclist.

So now we can choose – thank you Olympus – when Custom settings, temporarily reset, revert to the saved setting. They should revert when the camera is turned off and restarted, obviously. But the cyclist scenario would drive me mad. Trouble is, the option to choose not to revert to saved when the camera goes to sleep adds one more sub-menu item to a menu that boasts around 160 items on the E-M1 Mark III. I haven’t counted the total menu plus sub-menu items but it must be about three times that, around the 500 mark. That is so many permutations this page won’t hold enough zeros to show them.

I write books on these cameras, I review them and I have at least 4 of them at any one time. Currently an E-M1 Mark III, Panasonic G9, Panasonic GX9 and Panasonic GM1. A Panasonic S1 and Canon M50 sit forlorn and unused on a shelf so the Micro Four Thirds are in use all the time. And yet even I regularly have to consult Micro Four Thirds forums when I need a setting. No one person’s wisdom is enough to deal with all the possibilities of these cameras. No matter what their experience. The wisdom of the crowd reigns supreme. Could there even be Micro Four Thirds cameras without online help? My books (plug,plug) can go some way to help, I hope but I can’t anticipate all my own settings for a job lt alone someone else’s.

I remember one day being in Hampton Court Park when a robin landed on the handlebars of my Brompton bike as it leaned against a tree. A charming little snap. I needed to act fast but simply couldn’t get the G9 to fire It seemed to have a mind of its own. No amount of fiddling made any difference. I switched the camera on and off to reset it to my standard Custom setting and got my focus back. No joy. The robin, having watched my bumbling, ascertained that I was not threatening its territory and therefore had no need to peck out my eyes. So it flew away.

The problem? One I had met many times before, Auto-Nose-Focus. My schnozzle had helpfully placed the AF focus box at the extreme bottom left of the screen where it happily bleeped to tell me it had obtained focus. On a tree a hundred metres away. I saw many more robins that morning, an unusually large number. Then I realised why. ‘My’ robin had gathered all its mates together to ‘ave a larf’ as we English say. They would hop from seat back to branch to bike bars just in front of me, pose nicely, their little beaks in the air as they tweeted away. But with attitude. And just as I pushed the shutter button, they would fly off and fly in circles around my head with an air of dumb insolence.

Well, OK , that last part isn’t true. But my robin did fly off before I could snap it. I had the touch pad AF set on when the camera switched on in Custom 1 mode. I thought it was off but I’d actually set Touch screen On/Off to a function button so that it was on when the camera booted – which I normally preferred – but I could disable it at a button push. Should I now set it off on C1 so that I would push the function button to disable it? It’s at this point that my mind boggles. I really don’t know. Whether I want it on or off depends on what is in front of me when I switch the camera on. I could set it on with C1 and off with C2. But then I’d have a decision to make before i even switched the camera on. So I do the logical thing, the thinking man’s solution to all photographic problems – and a lot of the others, too – leave it as it is and hope for the best.

A robin that could have been immortalised has lost its chance of fame because it preferred my humiliation to living on forever. I lost a possibly saleable picture. It occurred to me that had this been 1970 and I was using my Nikon F, I would have just raised the camera, adjusted the focus in a jiffy and pushed the button. The Nikon would have been loaded with Kodak Tri X, set to 1/125th at f8. The ensuing shot may not have been quite as sharp as my G9, probably not as well exposed but here’s the thing, I would have had it. No startup up time, no menu to fumble through, press a button and you’re good.

For an ex press photographer, having to press the button on a shot knowing that it will be wildly out of focus is horrifying. A news shot It doesn’t have to be pin sharp, just sharp enough to show the action, tell the story. All that wonderful digital technology, those years of development, the PDAF, the DfD, the algorithms and the beeps and what happened? I missed a picture that I would have got with a bloody box brownie.

In a way, that probably why my clean screen E-M1 went down so well. All we really need is a clear, uncluttered view of our subject. Exposure done by the camera is a slam dunk these days.

The thing that slows you down is the autofocus. If it isn’t immediately on the subject, it is slow to correct. With manual focus just turn the focus ring. It takes an instant. The problem with autofocus is not how fast it is but in getting it to focus in the right place. When it does, it’s the best. When it doesn’t it is much slower than manual focus. You can just frame the subject how you wish and turn the focus ring until it looks sharp. It’s actually quicker than checking of the AF has applied itself to the right place.

I’m not saying that manual focus is best in all circumstances, it certainly isn’t. But where you are on the lookout for pictures and one suddenly comes up, a clean screen and manual focus are a combination made in heaven.