Long Exposure = Poor Card Reading

[augiecrazy8]

Wasn't real sure where best to put this, but I have a question regarding slow card reading after long exposures.

So a few weeks back I was on my honeymoon and snuck out at night to take some night time photos of a 400 year old fort on the island of St. Maarten. Because it was so dark, I took several images with 1 minute & 30 second exposures all the way through 3 minutes. The first several images I took wrote to my card quickly with no problem. But as I started to take more and more shots, the camera was pausing for long periods of time to write all the information to the card. It reminded me of when you shoot in continuous burst mode, and after firing off 15 shots the camera sort of freezes to write to the card.

So before asking if anyone has any ideas, I was using a Transcend 32GB Class 10 SDHC card in my Canon T2i. The card was completely empty when I started. It holds upwards of 500 shots and I only took 50 or so that night, so the card was not full. It was 90 degrees outside, so potentially the camera was getting warm, but that was the only thing I could think of.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[kcoppock]

My first thought is to check if you have Long Exposure Noise Reduction turned on in your camera (it might be called something slightly different for Canon). This will do a dark frame exposure and do some advanced processing with it to reduce noise, but the downside is that it takes nearly (if not just) as long as the initial exposure to complete.

I would say for sure that was your issue, but I'm confused that you say it didn't do it to begin with. Either way, I'd definitely check to see if noise reduction is enabled.

[augiecrazy8]

I will definitely check on that setting. I'm assuming I could probably do a better job processing noise in Lightroom.

[UlpilotSC]

Originally Posted by augiecrazy8

I will definitely check on that setting. I'm assuming I could probably do a better job processing noise in Lightroom.

It's under custom menus on the t1i.... It's default is on for anything over 1 second.
The noise isn't bad at all. It actually seems to disappear on it's own when you convert raw to jpg, for the most part.