Solar Eclipse - A7rii in field issues and Lightroom crashes with eclipse files?

[ghanselman]

Had a weird experience with my newer to me Sony A7rii during the solar eclipse. I purchased the camera 2nd hand last summer and have been loving it. Quick disclosure before I jump in, I did go for a hike during the fall and even with a waterproof shell covering my camera bag, the camera did get slightly wet (not wet to the touch, but when I went to use the camera it was not recognizing the memory card and I wasn’t able to take any photos.) When I got back to the car I took the memory card out and opened the battery and SD card doors to let everything dry out.. This could be relevant but honestly not sure since the camera has worked fine since… I rented the Sigma 100-400 for the Solar Eclipse and regrettably bought the 20 stop K&F Solar ND filter (so many regrets here, please don’t tear me apart for this …) Also was using the Meike vertical battery grip and JJC intervalometer. In my research leading up to the eclipse, a few people suggested using uncompressed RAW instead to fully maximize the dynamic range. Mounted it all up, dialed in my exposure settings in Manual mode, used manual focus and set the intervalometer to shoot every 5 minutes with a continuous bracket at 1.0 EV 5 images. I know this wasn’t necessary until totality, but I was nervous about fiddling with settings when totality began so I just set it ahead of time. After a few shots I wanted to look at my images so I could zoom in and check focus, but when I hit the playback button nothing happened. The display was still working in live view, and the camera continued to take photos so I know the camera didn’t "lock up". I waited a bit and pressed the playback button again, with no luck. I checked the red light to see if it had finished writing to the SD card, and the light was off. SD card is a Lexar Pro 128GB by the way. I decided to stop the intervalometer, turn the camera off and back on, and was able to then review my images. I started the intervalometer again and after a bit was ready to prepare for totality. I hit the FN button to change some settings and just like before the camera just didn’t respond to any input from me. I tried FN, playback, Menu, and all of the C buttons and quick access buttons on the scroll wheel. The camera again was still taking photos and live view was working, but buttons weren’t responding. I again turned it off and back on, and was able to make the exposure adjustments I needed/wanted to capture totality.

Now, even more odd, is that I imported the photos into Lightroom Classicand LR keeps crashing. I originally converted the 100 or so photos to DNG like I normally do in a very small Catalog, and then tried doing a brand new catalog with the ARW files. When I go to the develop module sometimes the preview will go crazy and turn almost completely white or completely black, other times the program will just stop responding from simply switching to a new photo or applying a setting, and eventually crash or require me to use task manager to end. This does not happen with other catalogs. PC is a custom build. AMD 5700x, 6700xt, 32gb ddr4 3200 ram, and OS, Catalog and Raw Storage drives are all on Gen 3 or higher NVME SSDs. Win 11, GPU drivers and Lightroom are all up to date. GPU acceleration is on in LR. I have been able to successfully pull a stack of photos and open them in Photoshop as layers, work on that photo stack with no lag or slowness, but as soon as I go back to Lightroom I have issues. DNG file size is around 25mb, uncompressed ARW files are about 85mb. Also kind of strange, when I did work on one of the stacks in PS I used a technique B&H suggested of taking the bracketed shots, converting them to a smart object and then using the layer->smart objects->stack mode->mean to combine the exposures. When I did this I noticed a LOT of grain, I actually thought I may have captured stars at first. Settings on that image were iso 400 f/8 1/100 for the base exposure. Attaching the image stack below that I was able to process in PS. Also attaching the image that I tried to get for the "diamond ring". Settings were iso 100 f/22 1/25. I was in Plattsburgh, NY and there were some thin clouds around but I can't recall if I noticed them during totality. I’m just wondering what the heck happened here? Are the files messed up? Is my camera potentially messed up? Is any of this normal? I’ll be happy to clarify anything if needed, would really appreciate any insight so I don’t find myself in the same situation in the future. Thanks in advance.

 

[Lan]

Sorry to hear you had problems.

My first suspect is that Meike grip. Meike's quality control is not good. Try the camera without it, and see how it performs?

Also not smitten with the recent Lexar cards I've bought. I'd tend to buy Sony, Sandisk or Prograde. SanDisk 170 ExtremePro cards are not expensive.

SanDisk cards usually come with a tool called RescuePro which can recover corrupted cards.

For your desktop machine, I'd make a backup and then run chkdsk. An extra backup is important just in case something goes wrong.

 

[Adam-T]

Sorry to hear you had problems.

My first suspect is that Meike grip. Meike's quality control is not good. Try the camera without it, and see how it performs?

I had a Meike grip when I had an R2 and it sent the camera scatty , was nothing but trouble.

 

[dcstep]

Congrats on getting some nice shots. I don't know LR, but when you get it working, try some extremes of contrast, lowering/raising highlights, saturating the reds, etc., etc. Zoom in on the solar flares, etc. What you've shown is just the beginning of the possibilities.



You've got the makings of some great shots.



What was wrong with the solar filter? You don't show any of those shots. Did you under-expose? You had plenty of time to adjust on the fly. With all the bracketing, I'd be surprised if you didn't get some nice shots. ISO 100, f/8 and 1/300-sec or so, depending on degree of your filter.

 

[W5JCK]

Lightroom is Adobe "bloatware", like most Adobe apps. I really like it, but Adobe does have the issue of bloat. I find that a LR catalog needs to be kept fairly small. If you have a very large catalog with dozens of collections and thousands or more of images, LR will eventually slow down to a crawl. So that can be an issue.

I've been using uncompressed RAW with my Sony a7C without issue, however perhaps if you use uncompressed RAW with your camera that might be an issue. The larger files, as in twice the size of compressed RAW, can add up after a while and bloat the app.

There could also be an issue with your computer's cache becoming too big and slowing things down. It is always a good idea to shut off your computer once in a while, then restart it. This goes for Windows and macOS. I use macOS.