A few weeks ago, I went to a Snocross event here in Mt. Pleasant. While I wasn’t able to cover the entire track, I did find a few good spots to capture images from. Most of the time I was able to keep my shutter speed up above 1/1000 of a second to freeze the fast action.
During the first hour of the event, I was over-using the 10 fps high speed shutter in the camera I was using. I was capturing RAW to a 32GB CF card, and JPEG to a 32GB SDXC card. In that first hour I ran through about half of my 32GB memory card. With my other memory cards at home, I had to re-think my approach and make a few changes.
First, I decided that I didn’t need backups of every photo, so I stopped recording JPEG to the SDXC card. Now the camera would instead capture everything in RAW and automatically switch to the SD card when the CF was full.
Second, I realized that even though snocross is fast action, I didn’t need a full 10 fps like other sports where tiny changes in position really count. So I set my low-speed continuous shooting to 6 fps.
The last change I made was in my technique. As the day moved on, I learned to be more judicious about when the best action was happening, and only held down the shutter at those more intense moments. Bursts of 20 photos with a lot of throw-away images turned into bursts of about 4-5 photos at the peak of action. That was about as few photos as I was willing to take, because the first couple photos would usually be waiting for the lens focusing to lock on to the fast-moving subjects. (For focus settings on the 7D Mark II, I used focus case 1 at the beginning of the day, and then switched to focus case 6 later which I felt helped improve the focus speed.)
By the end of the day I ended up with a full CF card and about 50% of my SD card full, so I had plenty of room. Next time I’ll not only have this experience to build off of, but I’ll make sure I don’t forget my extra cards at home for a full day sports event.
Hope you enjoy the gallery. Next up on my Instagram will be some photos I took in December at Pismo Beach.
