Christmas Sales for Shutterbugs

Since we are rapidly approaching the Holidays I thought this would be a good week to post an article on some good gift ideas you can share with your family if you are a shutter bug or gifts you can buy your shutter bug.

Canon released the 7D Mark II not long ago, which has been a very successful follow up to their popular 7D and now the 7D Mark II is $1,049 down from it’s original price of $1,400, but you have to buy it with a PIXMA PRO Printer. If you want to catch this deal, run on over to B&H to get one, according to our friends at SLRLounge.

One again Amazon is blowing people’s minds by dropping the price of the original Sony A7 Full-Frame Mirrorless to under $1000 for the holiday season. You can run over now and get it, body only for $998 here.

Another great deal on the B&H site is Sony SD 32GB Memory cards at 94MB/s for $12.99. That is an insanely low price for such a fast memory card and if you remember my post from last week about memory cards, this is one of the ones you want.

For some holiday gifts for under $50, you cannot go wrong with the following winners for shutter bugs.

Joby Gorillapod tripod now just $39.99 on B&H, I personally have one of these and they are fantastic. You can literally wrap the legs around tress branches, fence posts, etc and mount your camera on it for unique perspectives.

Fotodiox Canon 24-105mm F/4 L IS USM Thermos Cup - $14.95

Pelican 0915 Memory card case - $17.99 This model is for SD, Mini SD and Micro SD cards and is made of Tough Polycarbonate Resin and water resistant. They also offer a model for CF cards (Model # 0945) if you have those as well like I do for $17.48

Last but not least in my opinion is the RAVPower 15 Watt Solar Charger with Dual USB ports that is foldable with iSmart Technology. This is one heck of an awesome way to charge your iPhone, iPad, or camera batteries out in the field. I am getting one this year after listening to my friend SnapChick rave about hers on her YouTube Channel. Currently on sale for $49.35 on Amazon.

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas and are lucky enough to be on the receiving end of one of these awesome gifts.


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Memory Cards

One of the most important pieces of your photography set up, even more so than your camera, is your memory cards. I can hear many of you out there now gasping, “How can you say that? The camera HAS to be THE MOST IMPORTANT part of a photographer’s arsenal!”

Well, you would be wrong. As I mentioned in my earlier blog post titled It’s Not ONLY About the Camera, your camera is not nearly as important as you might think or as camera sales people would have you believe. Your camera is your primary tool as a photographer, but even more important than your camera is the memory card that you use.

Why is the memory card so important? Because your camera has what is known as a buffer, which is the amount of internal space in memory that the camera can hold images in before it has to start writing them to the memory card. If you are someone that shoots sports or anything else with action, like wildlife and have your camera on continuous shooting, you can only snap so many shots before your camera starts blinking that it’s “Busy” and the little red light that indicates that it’s writing to the memory card starts flashing like mad. When you reach this point, you cannot snap anymore images until the camera is done emptying it’s buffer.

Your wait time can be seriously shorter if you make sure you only buy FAST memory cards. Now I know the next thing you are all saying is “I thought ALL memory cards are fast, they are faster than hard drives!” Well, you would be right in that respect, except for SSD or Solid State hard drives, which are basically massive memory cards used in place of a conventional hard drive. However, not all memory cards are created equal and you need to be aware of this when you are buying them for your camera so that you can get maximum performance when you really need it.

Whether your camera uses SD cards or CF cards, you need to make sure you are buying the fastest ones you can afford so that you spend more of your time shooting and less time waiting on your camera to write those images to the memory card. Trust me, if you are shooting sports and you miss an awesome shot because your buffer is full and your memory card is so slow it takes 30-60 seconds for your buffer to clear, you will not be a happy camper! Memory cards do have different write speeds and as a result, the faster cards cost considerably more than the slower ones do. If you walk into say your local Walmart and buy an SD or CF card in the photo department, you will get say a 32GB SD card for $12 or maybe even $10, or that 8GB CF card is only $8 and think, “Man that is a great deal!” It’s not such a great deal when that $8 or $10 memory card costs you a once in a lifetime shot.

When you are buying memory cards, look closely at the label and see what the write speed is. For CF (Compact Flash) cards, you really want once that have a write speed of 120-160Mbps, which means Mega-bytes per second. For SD cards, look for ones that are class 10 only and XC with 900x for the speed are some of the best. With either of these kinds of cards, you buffer will empty in a few seconds instead of 30-60 seconds or longer. Now these memory cards won’t be cheap, but they don’t have to break the bank either. Look on sites like Amazon and wait until they go on sale to “pull the trigger” so to speak. The Sandisk Extreme Pro CF with 160Mbps speed is $79.99 for a 64GB model or $44.95 for a 32GB one. The same model in an SD card is $42.99 for a 64GB model and $24.95 for the 32GB one.

Now that you are better educated on memory cards, hopefully you won’t miss that shot! And remember, you don’t HAVE to get them as big as 32GB or 64GB, 8GB or 16GB will do, unless you shoot thousands of shots at a time.

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Two Ways to Make Lightroom Faster

This week I thought I’d blog about something a little bit different than photography itself. This week’s post is all about ways to improve Lightroom’s performance for when your Libraries are 30,000+ photos for a single year like mine are.

One of the first things you should be doing is using an external drive for ALL your photos. Don’t put your photos on your OS drive as it will fill up and max out too quickly along with all your software. I personally use a 4TB external drive with USB 3 for best performance and as soon as I finish a shoot, I copy all the images off my cameras memory cards and into this drive by year, month and day. Once that is done, you have to import them into Lightroom, now the way to improve Lightroom performance is to use SmartPreviews all the time. SmartPreviews takes your large RAW files and makes small versions of them for Lightroom to use and in turn make scrolling through Lightroom’s Library Module and loading Lightroom faster.

Notice the red circle around SmartPreviews

There are two way to deploy SmartPreviews, the first is on Import, so when Importing, under the Import dialog where you can add Copyright info, Keywords and such, check the box to use SmartPreviews. As Lightroom imports your RAW files it will then run the SmartPreview builder and make SmartPreviews of all your new images. The second way to activate SmartPreview in an existing Library of images is to select ALL images from the Library Module and then click the Library menu item, go down to Previews, and then choose Build SmartPreviews.

Deploying SmartPreviews from the Library Menu

 Now since you are deploying SmartPreviews for an existing Library of images in the second option it will take some time for them to complete, especially if your Libraries are huge like mine, but the nice thing is, once it’s done, it’s done and you can move around in Lightroom so much easier. The only catch is when you have SmartPreviews of an existing Library, you will now have doubles of every image, in a way, but the way around this is unplug or just unmount your drive as you work in Lightroom and make your edits and exports. You only need the drive mounted when you are adding new images from your camera and when you want the edits permanently saved to the original RAW file, then just mount the drive and Lightroom will sync the edits AUTOMATICALLY, that is a NO BRAINER ;)

Now, the next thing you can do to improve Lightroom performance is increase Lightroom’s cache. For those of you who don’t work in I.T. like I do for my day job, cache is a portion of your hard drive that Lightroom uses to augment the memory in your system. So if you are editing say a batch of 1,000 50Mb RAW files. That’s 6GB of files you are working with at once time and let’s say your laptop only has 4GB of RAM, how does Lightroom work under these conditions? By using some of your say 1TB hard drive as cache to supplement your system RAM. Now by default, Lightroom only uses 1GB of your disk drive for cache, which is nowhere near enough, so bump that setting up to 50GB. How do you do this? Well, click Lightroom, then Preferences and on the pop up window, cluck the File Handling tab and at the bottom you see Camera RAW Cache setting, in that box delete 1GB and type in 50GB. Why 50, well, I have tested 20GB and with both an SSD drive and a regular hard disk I noticed no improvement, but at 50GB I noticed improvement. In the screenshot you see I have mine set at 100GB, that’s because I have 12TB to work with so I figured why not double mine from the 50GB I recommend to you. Can you use 100GB, sure, but make sure you have ample space free on your system drive to do so first.

Changing the Camera RAW Cache size

That’s it folks, two ways to improve Lightroom performance in your workflow!

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