ghanselman
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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 and 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 noise, 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. Below is the image that I was able to process in PS. And with settings at iso 100 f/22 1/25 for the exposure, my "diamond ring" was hazy looking? I was in upstate NY (Plattsburgh not Buffalo) and there were some thin clouds before totality, can't remember seeing them in the sky during. 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.
Noisy photo
Now, even more odd, is that I imported the photos into Lightroom and 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 noise, 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. Below is the image that I was able to process in PS. And with settings at iso 100 f/22 1/25 for the exposure, my "diamond ring" was hazy looking? I was in upstate NY (Plattsburgh not Buffalo) and there were some thin clouds before totality, can't remember seeing them in the sky during. 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.
Noisy photo
