It was the most annoying thing – EVER! Seriously, every time it happened, the timing couldn’t be worse. It was an inconvenient nuisance and we had to do something about it. It would happen every. single. time we were on a photo session. And the worst part? It literally interrupted the flow of our sessions and got us completely flustered.
We were early on in our career as photographers and thought we were doing everything right. We learned from others who had gone before us about investing in equipment that lasts. Even if that meant doing without for a season while we saved up for the professional gear that would endure the test of time and repetitive use. So we had our Canon 5D Mk III’s and Canon L series Lenses, but something still wasn’t right. There was no way, we thought, that a five thousand dollar camera combination should get hung up every few shutter fires! Did we have faulty equipment? Was something wrong with the camera file settings? Or was it us!? We didn’t know, but we sure were getting tired of it.
You see, every time we would need to fire off multiple shots in quick succession, the camera would take an handful of shots, and then we’d get this annoying red indicator light and a message that said ‘Recording – Images Remaining: X’ (The number of images left to record). Was it really possible that this professional grade camera wasn’t capable of firing more than five shots without taking a break to record images?!
So we asked the question to some other photographers we were networked with. And when we found out what the real issue was, we felt a little bit silly. It had nothing to do with our camera. Nothing to do with camera settings. Nothing to do with us. The answer? We needed professional grade SD and CF cards to keep up with our cameras. The memory cards we had invested in had a lot of storage, but the file read and write speeds were embarrassingly slow! And we were a little embarrassed that we went so long without thinking of that possible solution.
So what cards do we use today? We went out right away and bought the Extreme Pro SD and CF cards with read and write speeds of 90MB per second and up! In comparison to our 15MB per second cards we were using previously, well…there really was no comparison. The difference was instant, and we couldn’t have been more happy to come across that knowledge!
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