Memory Cards – What’s the Big Deal?

I’m on several Canon EOS R5 mirrorless camera related blogs, and a question frequently comes up about what type of memory cards to use. After spending $7K on an R5 + battery grip + 24-70mm f2.8L, don’t go on the cheap with a $19.95 dollar store special CFexpress (CFx) memory card.

You’ve already melted your credit card, and your spouse hasn’t spoken to you for a month, so what’s another couple of hundred bucks for a decent memory card? That’s what your extra kidney can be sold and used to pay for the bill.

Seriously, the devil is in the details as they always boast about speed, usually the “read” speed. Who cares what the read speed is, as the problem is getting the data on the card and not pulling the data from the card.

Before buying the memory card, do two things. (1) Check the card specifications for the WRITE speed, and (2) check the camera manufacturer’s recommended memory card list. Click this link for the Canon EOS R5 Recommended Memory Cards.

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Progress is Painful

As someone who’s been a geek most of his life, the last few days have been a stressful period. As a photographer, I store my images on a network-attached storage drive or NAS drive with RAID 1 hard disks.

My previous QNAP TS-420 has been running 24×7 for five years now and performed flawlessly but is starting to get a little long in the tooth in electronic years. Like a dog who ages seven years for every actual year, electronics are probably worse.

Initially, my old NAS just stored primarily financial documents which are not much of a burden on the drive. Photo images are getting larger with every new release of a camera. My RAW images have grown from 20 MB to 50 MB in size. Even JPG’s are now approaching 20 MB in size.

The TS-420 has worked well storing electronic images but has to work extra hard to read and write the huge RAW files. LightRoom would pause for a few seconds every time it had to deal with one of the files.

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My New Canon EOS R5

I’ve had this WordPress site created for sometime now but didn’t have much to put on it. I typically post to FaceBook: (https://www.facebook.com/SinCityCameraGuy/) Instagram (@VegasCameraGuy) or my Flickr account (www.flickr.com/photos/LyleMariam).

I do some street photography, but up until now, most of my work has been shooting models. Before moving to Las Vegas, I used to teach advanced photography and model photography at a major modeling school. I also did work shooting concerts and other venues for a large booking agency.

Anyway, to make a long story short, I’ve been in this gig business for a long time, starting in film and now all digital.

If you are familiar with cameras, you’ve likely heard all of the uproar about the new Canon EOS R5 full-frame camera. It was released on 7/30/20 and mine showed up 8/3/20, a couple of days ago.

The full manual is almost 1,000 pages, which should give you an idea of how complicated this camera is, and I doubt if I’ll ever fully master it. My first couple of days have been spent trying to get it completely set up the way I want. That has been a painful headbanging experience, but I think now I’m on the other side of the initial learning curve.

It hurts living on the bleeding edge!

I hope to get out and start shooting some pictures and see if all the money I’ve spent was worth it. I’ve been a Canon guy forever, and except for my medium format shooting, a Canon camera has always been in my hand.

I used to be a professional photographer but now I’m just another amateur photographer with an expensive habit.