Photographing MotoGP on the OM-1: Pro Performance and Packable Prowess

When it comes to market share of professional photographers, OM System is probably a statistical rounding error compared to the powerhouses of Canon, Sony, and Nikon.

What’s popular, though, is less important than what delivers the results, so it was interesting for me to attend my first MotoGP as a professional in nearly a decade for the first time with OM gear. Would I get the results required for publication?

The short answer is absolutely.

The rest of this article is the long answer.

With a high-quality compact build, sharp optics, and weatherproofing, OM System gear suits my current life of flying and riding – as a motorcycle journalist, I’m either trying to get my gear into a carry-on bag or stuff it into a pannier box on the side of a motorcycle. For 2025, my partner and I are traveling all year – so far we’ve toured India, France, Spain, and Germany by motorcycle and the UK by car (where I wasn’t able to borrow a bike for any decent length of time).

While in the UK, the opportunity to attend the MotoGP race at Silverstone arose, and with it the chance to test out my OM-1’s capabilities in the cauldron of a MotoGP – compact missiles travelling at over 300 km/h with the most talented riders in the world on board.

I’m sure the OM-1 Mark II is a very capable camera, although not quite good enough for me to worry about upgrading from the OM-1 I still use. I still have the 40-150mm f/2.8 lens that I purchased over 10 years ago, now for a trip to the USA with my family. That was used on the original EM-1, and the other lenses I had were the 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro and the 7-14mm f/2.8 Pro. I still have that mid-range zoom, and it’s a great lens, but it’s largely been replaced by the 12-100mm f/4, and the 7-14mm was sold relatively recently and replaced by the 8-25mm f/4. This is because losing a stop but gaining the extra focal length and a filter thread was more important to me than that slightly faster, but bulkier lens.

At Silverstone, however, I knew, it being a Formula One track as well as a motorcycle track, that I would need to have lots of reach. So I attempted to hire the 150-400mm OM System lens, but unfortunately, I wasn’t able to secure one in time and had to settle for the 300mm f/4. For those living under a rock, Micro Four Thirds uses a smaller sensor than full-frame, and so effectively your focal length is doubled compared to a full-frame system. So that 300mm lens becomes a 600mm lens. Now, some will say that the f/4 means it’s really f/8 or something similar, and that’s an absolute load of rubbish. It’s still f/4; it just doesn’t display the shallow depth of field of a 600mm f/4; it has more depth of field, which I don’t see as a major disadvantage. I can certainly defocus things in the background of an image in software these days, much better than I can make more depth of field, although, of course, if you really want more depth of field with full-frame, they are very good in low light and very good at high ISO, so you can crank it up to compensate for having to use a smaller aperture.

I was keen to test the OM-1’s Pro Capture mode, which essentially starts capturing photographs using the electronic shutter with no blackout as soon as you press the shutter release. So it focuses and starts capturing images, but only actually writes them to the card if you press the shutter release the whole way. And then it will write about 25 to 50 frames (depending on your settings) prior to actually releasing the shutter to the card. If you’re trying to capture a motorcycle falling, well, that could be critically important. As you can see from some of the photographs on this page, that’s exactly what happened during the Moto3 race. The rider, David Munoz, got tangled up with other riders and started to crash. I saw this basically out of the corner of my eye, swung the camera around while pressing the shutter. The OM-1 with the 300mm managed to pick up his falling motorcycle, focus on it very well, and captured nearly 50 frames in total of the accident, including some of the most spectacular shots I’ve ever captured at a race meeting, and I’ve been to hundreds of them over the years.

As a keen reader of PetaPixel and viewer of the YouTube Channel, I know the OM-1 and probably even the OM-1 Mark II are not going to compare to the high-end Sony, Canon, and Nikon systems in their frame rates, buffer sizes, and focusing ability. However, you can pick up an OM-1 very, very inexpensively and get probably 99% of the performance, 99% of the time, for a hell of a lot less money and weight than those premium professional cameras.

The other thing that really puts me off changing back to full-frame is the size and bulk. It’s not so bad when you compare the cameras or even many of the wide-angle lenses. But my beloved 40-150mm f/2.8, or 80-300mm on a full-frame body, is pretty well irreplaceable compared to the full-frame systems when you start looking at the waterproof build quality, the price, the optical performance, the maximum aperture, and of course, the compact size. I’ve used this lens pretty well every week for 10 years, and it’s never missed a beat. Well, apart from the funny lens hood, which slides out and has a mechanism inside that is falling apart. I basically threw that into the back of the camera cupboard and thought, “Oh, I’ll replace one of those one day,” and never did. I should use a lens hood with this, but I just simply don’t.

All of my lenses and all of the Olympus cameras I’ve used since that EM-1, including my much beloved EM-1X, have been great. The X model, which I picked up at a very low price when it had been on the market for a couple of years, was built like a tank – very big and heavy compared to the other OM System cameras. However, it was wonderful to use, and I really did love that vertical grip. The OM-1, though, is a revelation and so much better than the EM-1X in nearly every respect, apart from possibly handling. I really did like the way the EM-1X handled.

The OM-1 is much better at tracking and continuous autofocus. Its buffer size is bigger, it writes faster to the cards, its video quality is much better, and it’s much, much lighter. Handling-wise, the camera is almost too light, and I would have liked to have had the battery grip for balance, especially with the rented 300mm f/4. This is a fabulous lens. It’s the first time I’ve been able to use the equivalent of 600mm at a Grand Prix handheld. I took a monopod with me and tried it out, and just simply went back to hand-holding the 300mm f/4, which was even easier to handhold than my old 300mm f/2.8 I used with the Canon equipment. The 300mm f/4 plus the stability offered by the in-body stabilization of the OM-1 meant many, many pictures were needle-sharp and just so much easier to compose when you are following the action of motorcycle racing that I can’t imagine trying to go back to the big, bulky, long lenses of Canon and Nikon for what is possibly slightly better quality at about four or five times the sticker price.

I’ve long believed that you should choose the photographic equipment you need to shoot the images you want to capture, not simply go out and buy the “best” (whatever that is this week). For some people, that means a film-based Leica; for other people, it might mean the Fuji X100VI. And for other people, the big expensive 600mm or 800mm lenses from Canon, Nikon, or Sony. For me, I need a system that is compact, weatherproof, tough, built to last, built to cope with things like vibration from motorcycle panniers, and also something I can get out and shoot fast action of moving motorcycles. The OM-1 suits what I do very, very well.

If I’m walking around taking still frames of static subjects, I can go into the high-resolution mode and get 50-megapixel pictures at the touch of a button. Handling-wise, I still prefer just C-AF mode for shooting things like motorcycles, but I’ve been doing this for many, many years. Those with less experience or who are coming into it from a cold start may find the vehicle tracking mode to be more effective for them. I tried it out at the Silverstone Grand Prix and found it to be a vast improvement over the system that was in the EM-1X, but still, at the end of the day, I am a creature of habit, and I just preferred it to focus on what I pointed at rather than letting the camera pick out the subject itself.

If you’re not all that interested in making sure you have the latest and greatest, but do want high-quality gear that does a great job and is compact enough to fit quite a large system into your carry-on luggage on an airplane, to carry it on a motorcycle, or tuck it away in the back of the car, an OM System with the professional lenses and a camera bag is far more compact and easier to manage than a full-frame system. It’s certainly not for everyone, and you’re limited to about 20 megapixels, but the quality of those images is still stunning. I still managed to sell a few shots to the largest motorcycle newspaper in the UK from the Silverstone Grand Prix, and I’m very, very happy with the results of the shoot.

Beyond the track, walking around with the 12-100mm f/4 lens fitted gives me quite a decent wide angle, 24mm equivalent, right out to decent telephoto. It’s the first lens with such a wide range I’ve used and been really happy with, especially one that goes from wide to long.

So it’s a very wide-ranging lens and definitely the lens I reach for if I just want to carry one. If I’m happy to carry a little more weight and I want a little bit more range, I often just carry the 8-25mm f/4 and the 40-150mm f/2.8. The gap between 25mm and 40mm is so narrow that I can usually crop in by taking a shot at 25mm without sacrificing too much. And this 40-150mm gives me the 300mm equivalent – add a 1.4 converter to the camera bag, and you’ve got a lot of range for not a lot of weight.

The handling of the OM-1 is enhanced by having four custom modes, which I can set up for the way I like to shoot different subjects and quickly flip between them. It has most, if not all, of the general professional-level operation that you would expect on a top-level camera, including rear button autofocus, multiple thumb wheels, a joystick for setting focus points, top-class in-body stabilization, and an incredible level of customisation options.

Before the OM-1 came into the camera kit, I did miss the continuous autofocus offered by the Canon systems that I had prior, but with the OM-1, the quality of that is much improved, and I really don’t miss it. Yes, I am absolutely certain that the current top-level systems from the other manufacturers may be a little better, but the hit rate is so high on the OM-1, its price and compact nature make it a no-brainer for me. I’m very happy to have switched out to the OM System, and I won’t be going back to full-frame anytime soon.

All images were captured with an Olympus 300mm f/4 Pro. Some included the 1.4x teleconverter.

About the Author: Nigel Paterson is a Australian motorcycle journalist and photographer. The opinions expressed above are solely those of the author.