Live Composite

The Live Composite Feature first appeared on the Olympus E-M10 model. Then, in September 2014, the firmware 2.0 update was made available for download and uprade to E-M1 bodies.

Unlike Live Bulb or Live Time, Live Composite isn't a "straight" classic feature from classic film cameras. It is clever software manipulation within the camera.

It appears that you choose the base exposure first. You do this by choosing the ISO and the f/no you want to use. Then you decide on the shutter speed. Let us say you are using f/8 and ISO 100 (a.k.a. ISO LOW). The right column in the table below indicates the ISO 100 equivalent Exposure Value you expect.

Once you have chosen the shutter speed, you activate the feature by pressing the shutter release button once. This then makes the base exposure.

Next, you press the shutter release button again. This now creates the subsequent frames - each frame is exposed for the shutter speed you have chosen and the camera keeps on making more frames.

During this exposure of frames, let us say you are at a dark night scene, the lit subject might be in one position in the scene and in other frames, move to another position. Or a car might drive past, spanning several frames.

You complete the process by pressing the shutter release. This stops making more frames and then the camera processes all the frames as layers superimposed on top of each other, as a composite image.

The JPEG image will be have the subject in several places in the scene or the car's lights will streak across the scene.

The way the layer processing is done, the image brightness will be similar to the first base image.

Pekka Potka has an article on Live Composite

Robert Evangelist has an article on Live Composite