Laguna Seca Ranch

[Kayaker72]

The Sandisk SD cards I used were rated at 170mb/sec.

Since I like to use the crop mode quite a lot on the R5 which provides smaller file sizes (but very adequate for my needs) I thought that these inexpensive cards would perhaps write 8-10 frames per second to the card.

I rarely hold the shutter down more than 2-3 seconds. Turns out it worked just fine. Never hit the buffer limit as Brant described but download to my external drive was a bit slow.

So, one of the reasons I thought a dedicated thread on Laguna Seca, aside from not clogging up the "Best Birds" thread, was I had several lessons that I learned. These are a couple of them I learned from Joel.

If you do not need the whole FF, shooting in crop mode does save memory card space.

The SD UHS-I cards were sufficient. I had been thinking of mothballing my UHS-I cards. But, they really are still useful with the R5. But, I do put more of the reason on the R5 buffer as SD Cards are rated on their "transfer" speed, or read speed. Write speed is much lower. Looking at this card, the write speed is actually ~90 MB/sec. So, bursts of 3 seconds at 9-12 fps is 27-36 frames. FF picture size is ~50-60 MB and crop is around 30 MB. So, the UHS-I card is only writing 1.5-3 frames per second, but the buffer is holding all those other frames. I did not focus on this at the time, but Bryan did test this and the R5 held 151 images shooting full RAW to a UHS-I card before the buffer filled. So, 30-40 image bursts...no problem, as long as you have enough time to clear the buffer between those bursts, which was the case, which is about 10-20 seconds.

So, I already own probably more memory in CFExpress cards than I will need in the future, but if I do ever need more, I likely would go UHS-I and save some money. Or, more likely, I have been shooting to one card slot only as I did not want to invest in UHS-II cards as well as CFExpress. Well, now maybe I'll invest in a large UHS-I card and shoot in duplicate again.

We did a total of 6 shooting sessions and I used one card for each session: 3 64gb CFExpress and 3 128gb SD1. None of the cards were full. I was shooting around 1200-1300 shots per session.

Might be a different experience for someone who likes to use a "machine gun" approach.

So, it was a bit of a joke on the trip, as I shot ~6,500 images day 1 and Joel was around 2,500. While I definitely take a number of images, this is easily my record for an event or trip. By far. Heck, day 1 by itself was a new record for me. I did get a bit better each day, but I did end up with ~16,000 images. I know...I know....

But, interestingly, I think we shot our bursts similarly as my longest sequences I am scrolling through are 15-30 images (I was shooting at 9 fps most of the time), and most of my sequences are less than 10 frames. But, another lesson for the next time I do something like this will be to be more selective in the opportunities that I try to photograph. Like, not every time a Caracara comes in for a landing needs to be photographed, and once I have, say, 10 of those, maybe I can stop and try to get another type of image.....