60D long exposure lock-up

[Ryan708]

I was wondering if anyone else had their 60D lock up with long exposures. Mine first did it during a 1/2 hour shot of the stars, on a pretty cool (25 degrees farenhiet) night. It has since done it at 5 minutes, and as low as 30 seconds one time. I have used different lenses and SD cards, all class 10. It freezes while trying to save the file. I thought the higher the ISO the more it had to process, and maybe that did it, but it froze on me at ISO 800, 5 minutes one time also. I would say I have had this happen about 5 times now. Also in perfectly warm weather. Just curious on thoughts. Should I shoot raw? Thanks fellow shooters.

 

[thejoyofsobe]

never had mine really 'lock up' before in long exposures.

by any chance do you have long exposure noise reduction enabled or set to auto? if so on long exposures the camera will also expose against the closed shutter for an equivalent amount of time so it can use that shot to subtract away some of the noise from your real shot. so say if you have it enabled or set to auto and have a single exposure for an hour your camera will be exposing against a closed shutter for an additional hour. if you don't know what's happening it can give the user the impression that the camera is locked up. even if you turn the camera off it will continue to expose against the closed shutter.

i know of no way to abort the long exposure noise reduction short of yanking the battery though i'll admit i've never done that so i don't know you're risking losing your original long exposure.

 

[Ryan708]

and this is why i asked. It was set to auto, and apparently only does it sometimes. Thanks for the info! You are dead on as to what was happening!

 

[bdunbar79]

I did a 3-shot HDR in-camera sequence once, which does the 3 shots automatically. I did -3ev, 0ev, +3ev. Each shot required an 8 second exposure for what I was doing. On shot 3 it just locked up and got lost and I had no idea what was going on. Now, this is really funny, the camera knew when the exposure was overwith, so my file was fine despite the shutter hanging open. All I did was after about 30s just fired the shutter button and it unlocked and worked normally. This was on a 5D Mark III.

 

[Ryan708]

nothing "unfroze" the 60 the red light just stayed on and even turning the mode dial didnt work, had to pull the batt. but i think i just needed to be patient haha