…the camera has to ‘download’ [or whatever the jargon is] the image after each
shot ?
2 shots ?
how many shots , with the “top end” ones ?
[necessary to know , if a guy is going to pull into a few second tube ride , then run up the beach and ask you , “did you get my WHOLE tuberide ?”]
ben
Uhmm- this is mostly speculation and reverse engineering, and a specialist in digital camera design ( electronics engineer and/or software expert) could give a far more useful answer -
In a shot you take with a digital camera, well, you have light falling on a photosensitive bit inside the thing, which is divided into a whole lot of segments. Each segment is polled in some sort of order - left-right and top-bottom maybe, and a value for what it saw is recorded and probably pre-processed to some extent, perhaps to make it into a particular file format like a JPG. Then it’s sent to the storage area of the camera.
Now, a video camera can do it a whole lot faster, not least because the image it is shooting is typically only 640x480 ( pixels…dots of color, ya know?) while most any self-respecting recently made digital camera will be doing something around 4 times the width and 4 times the height to make a file 16 times the size. At least.
This is where it gets entertaining… no matter how big a storage chip or card or stick you have stuck on the thing, the speed at which the camera will do another shot ( or finish the first one) will likely depend on how fast the internal processor is in the camera, how much internal memory it has and how fast that is and just how cleverly the internal software in the camera itself was written.
It’s not a matter of how fast it gets sent to the storage chip or card, that’s silicon chip-silicon chip and effectively instantaneous over such a short distance, it’s how fast it was made ready to send.
An analogy - you can have a gigantic hard drive in your computer, but if it doesn’t have a particularly fast processor or much RAM, and if the software you’re running isn’t that small, it’s gonna be slow. Add RAM, a faster processor and maybe clean up the software and it’ll go faster.
Similarly, if I am, say, running an older version of a spreadsheet on an older computer with less speed and memory, it gets done pretty much as fast as it would on my fastest machine with the newest version 'cos the new versions of that spreadsheet are downright huge. Millions of lines of code versus tens of thousands of lines of code.
And this is where the high-end digital camera stuff tends to justify its existence. More expensive camera, they can afford to throw in more and better processors, more internal memory and pay their software people to grind down the code some to be as fast-running as possible.
I do know that my pro photographer friends’ gear will do sequences ( and get a shot taken) faster, with less shutter lag than I can with my relatively inexpensive Fuji. Which can be explained, really, only as I have above.
And it’s also why software and firmware updates for digital cameras are something to pay attention to…they can change the performance of said camera quite a lot.
hope that’s of use
doc…
in simple english , I’ll stick to my canon AE-1 35mm roll film camera with a 2 frames per second power winder and manual lens [a 400 mm lens , with a 2x converter option effectively making it an 800 lens .]
Call me “old school” [yawn …labels eh ?] or whatever … but, it’s what I know and have used for the last twenty years , and it seems to take an okay sorta shot for my ‘amateur’ purposes here , anyway.
And for water shots , now my nikonos has carked it , I’ll just buy the occassional kodak disposable [they come with 400iso film …my current BandW avatar shot was taken with one]
ben
This should give you an idea of what you might need…
Taken about 100 yards from subject
Exif:
File Name
IMG_1026.CR2
Camera Model
Canon EOS DIGITAL REBEL XT
Shooting Date/Time
6/26/2005 12:27:19 AM
Shooting Mode
Aperture-Priority AE
Tv( Shutter Speed )
1/1250
Av( Aperture Value )
5.6
Metering Mode
Partial Metering
Exposure Compensation
0
ISO Speed
100
Lens
70.0 - 300.0mm
Focal Length
300.0mm
Image Size
3456x2304
Image Quality
RAW
Flash
Off
White Balance Mode
Auto
AF Mode
One-Shot AF
Parameters Settings
Contrast Standard
Sharpness Standard
Color saturation Standard
Color tone 0
Color Space
sRGB
Noise Reduction
Off
File Size
6953KB
Custom Function
C.Fn:01-0
C.Fn:02-0
C.Fn:03-0
C.Fn:04-0
C.Fn:05-0
C.Fn:06-0
C.Fn:07-0
C.Fn:08-0
C.Fn:09-0
Drive Mode
Single-frame shooting
Owner’s Name
unknown
Camera Body No.
0420204846
…I shot it with a 300mm but I swear I needed more length…try and pick up some extension tubes they’re cheap but they decrease light but since you’ll be at the beach you should have enough light to play around with. Also, you should keep in mind what purposes you’ll be using those pictures for. If it’s for the web then you can get away with cropping in closer…but if it’s for a magazine or blown up…getting some long range L glass might save you some frustration and give you more keepers. Your IS should definitely come in handy I know some people that swear by them, but having a tripod/monopod should get you better results. Oh BTW when I shot this there was a guy with a 500mm L stacked with a bunch of tubes there. Man, that was a crazy lens, it looked like a barrel from a naval destroyer.