D7000 locking up during shoot

Hi everyone,

I’m a new Nikonite, converted from Canon…

My first purchase was a slightly used Nikon D7000.

I haven’t used it with an external flash until last night. Recently I purchased a Yongnuo YN-560 II Speedlight Flash, and a Cowboystudio SYK-3 Optical Slave Trigger.. last night was the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] time I used this equipment (just so you know what set up I had last night when my problem started)

So, Last night during a shoot, I started having problems with my camera locking up towards the end of my shoot.

It seemed fine for the first hour or so, but towards the end of the shoot, as I was shooting rapid shots in a row, my camera would completely lock up. Even when I flipped it to OFF, nothing happened. All of the lights and display stuff was still showing… it was very odd.

I’ve never seen this on a camera before, even my Nikon.

Does anyone know what could be causing this?

If I let the camera sit for about 30-45 seconds it would start working again just fine, but then lock up again after 6-7 shots.

Any help would be much appreciated

I suspect from your description that your camera's buffer was full and needed to write ti disc the shots you had just taken. And depending the speed of your memory stick will greatly affect the time it takes to clear your buffer.

The only other time i have run into symptoms like the ones you have described was when I had an almost full memory card and it slowed the camera down dramatically, sometimes low light images that are having high noise reduction applied in camera has slowed things down a lot. But my best bet would be exactly what Dave W says above and a faster card may be beneficial.

Interesting... my card is a 32gig San Disk I believe...

Sure, but how fast IS it? Are you using a 10mb/s card or a 95mb/s card? Class 2 or Class 10?
Also important is weather you're shooting RAW or JPG obviously..
The D7000 doesn't have a huge buffer so if you're snapping off shots in RAW, you're likely only to get about 8-10 with a class 10 card. At least that's been my experience. One of the worst things about the D7k if you ask me is that lack of a large enough buffer to make 6fps worth using.

I'll further add that lately i've been using 12bit raw files and it HAS sped the camera up a little bit, makes it just a tad more responsive when bursting shots. I see no difference in quality using 14 vs 12bit RAW files.

I will take a look once I'm back home. Learn something new every day! I've been shooting for years and I've never ran into this information before

I was shooting RAW.

If your card is anything slower than 45 mb/sec then I suspect you're just seeing a full buffer that is flushing. San Disk makes cards as fast as 90 mb/sec but I think that might be overkill. On my D7000 using a 45 mb/sec card I was able to dump the buffer as fast as I was filling it up.