For the most part, I am overwhelmingly happy with my 5D. There is one issue, though, that is causing me confusion. I have been playing with long exposures and hoping to do more with star trails and such. Those exposures require sometimes hours of open shutters to really look good. I have tried one for 10 minutes and it looks pretty good, but the star trails aren’t long enough. So, a while back I tried one at 30 minutes and the camera locked up. I thought maybe that since I messed up some settings that I had done something wrong, so just now, I tried it again.
It didn’t work. In fact, it locked up my camera. When I close the shutter after 30 minutes, the red light [which stays on during exposures and data writes to the CF card] stays on for at least another half hour – basically until I pull the battery. I can’t even turn it off with the switch. The LCD flashes how many pictures are left on the CF card, but no other information other than the word “busy” on the screen.
This concerns me and I have no idea how to fix it. I’ve tried searching the ‘net for it, but nothing pops up. Then again, this camera is so new that I may just be the first person to experience this difficulty. I sent Canon an email and maybe they’ll send me a fix.
Has anyone else seen a similar problem to this on this or any other model of camera?
[UPDATE:] Silly me: I enabled a nifty feature. For long exposures, there’s an “auto noise reduction” setting… so, for my 30+ minute exposure, the camera said to itself: “hmmm… there might be too much noise in this shot. I’ll fix it.” and then proceded to expose an equal length “black frame” shot to be used a a “hot pixel” frame of reference for de-noising the original image – thereby causing a 30+ minute lock up in which I could not use my camera. And, of course, that means I lost my picture when I pulled the battery. Oops.
::: jeffphillips.org ::: 