Last week when I was photographing some time lapses for the tilt-shift lens
video linked in the corner I ended up shooting around about 10 sequences
halfway through this as the Sun was moving through the sky it started to
shine on my camera and heat it up as the camera got hotter
I noticed the buffer starting to fill up and the camera didn't want to offload
the images to the SD card as quickly as normal it actually stopped on one of my
time-lapse sequences halfway through now after taking the camera out of the Sun
opening up the SD card and battery door and giving it a few minutes it did start
to cool down and work properly again I tried it again at home with the camera
in the Sun and the buffer did start to fill up again so it does seem as though
SD cards do reduce their efficiency for the camera to offload the buffer onto
the SD card when they do get hot the card I was using had a write speed of 60
megabytes per second and as the images have a size of 40 1.9 megabytes per
second and I was in the interval function at one frame a second there
should have been enough kind of bandwidth to cope with all of this
information now I know these transcend cards are coming to the end of their
lives due to the write speeds getting closer and closer to the limits of the
new higher megapixel cameras and interval settings so I am gonna have to
look for some more SD cards and I will get some with much faster write speeds
that you can get nowadays so I'm guessing as these cards have a write
speed really close to the interval data creation speed so that's the creation
speed that the camera creates information to be offloaded to the card
I'm guessing as these SD cards get hotter there is a bit of resistance
building up with this heat in the components of the SD card and this
decreases the maximum write speed to below 41 point 9 megabytes per second at
one point it did stop offloading the buffer altogether this is when I moved
the camera out of the Sun I opened the battery door and I opened the SD card
door obviously I didn't remove the SD card because it was still trying to
write it as the camera cooled down it started
offloading again now the faster the right speed is I think the less likely
this is to happen so if you do have a camera like the a 73 and you do want to
create time lapses in quite a warm environment
I'd suggest getting SD cards with a minimum write speed of around about 100
to 150 megabytes per second because if the cards you own have a write speed
close to the data creation rate which is the amount of megabytes being produced
by your camera per second as your camera heats up you might notice that it takes
longer to unload the buffer now if you're shooting sports you might notice
that your waiting around for longer or if you're shooting a time-lapse you
might notice that it stops or that you can see the buffer starting to fill up
now I've done a video on SD card classifications which is linked in the
corner or in the description below so if you're not sure what all the different
logos are on your SD card go and watch that but this is something to be aware
of if you're shooting in a hot environment or if your camera is going
to be in the Sun whilst doing a time-lapse now have you had any problems
with your SD card not working as efficiently as normal if you have let me
know in the comments below it'll be great to hear your experiences with SD
cards and be sure to put what card you have and it's right speed most of them
have this written on it these days and if not I'm sure you could find it out on
Google now if you want to know more about SD card classifications click on
this next video here and for a video tailored especially for you click on
this one down here and if you haven't already make sure to subscribe for
weekly tutorials in photography I'll see you next time