Nikon SLR Cameras

Why won't my DSLR take a picture?

MeHow
MeHow

I have a Nikon D5000 and when i take a bunch of pictures at once, eventually it'll stop taking. I'm guessing this is due to the heat of the flash and it needs to cool down, but I'm not sure and may believe that it could be the shutter. Which one is it? Or what is it?

Taylor
Taylor

Thats because the buffer fills up. You can't just take pictures @ 3fps continuously until the card fills up - the camera has to give itself a chance to catch up with itself. Stop shooting continuous bursts and actually learn to time your shots.

AWBoater
AWBoater

Two things.

1. If you are using a flash, definitely it will overheat and slow down.

2. If you are using continuous mode, if you have a slow SD card then you can slow things down there as well. Use 30Mb/s cards if you want the best performance for continuous mode shutter.

Andrew
Andrew

It's called a buffer and it's normal.

Images are sent to storage as they're made, but if too many are taken too quickly, they have to more-or-less queue up, and the camera stops shooting until the backlog is cleared. Your manual or the Nikon website should give you the exact figures.

The_Ghan
The_Ghan

Your buffer is full.

keerok
keerok

Your digital camera has a computer. Pictures captured by the digital sensor are stored momentarily in fast memory for the tiny computer to work on before it is saved to the relatively slower memory card. That split-second process sometimes gets clogged up if you rapidly take pictures in succession. The fast memory gets filled up and has to wait for the computer to finish processing the earlier pictures before another one can be taken. The fast memory is called buffer memory or simply buffer. All of this affects the frames per second (FPS) spec of the camera.

If you use flash, the lightbulb in it uses a very high voltage. To do that, the electronics of the flash stores the power from the batteries to a holding cell to hold more energy than what the batteries can release instantly. When the flash lights up, all the power in that holding cell is spent and the cycle of charging the holding cell begins again. The weaker the batteries, the longer it will take to recharge and allow the flash to fire again.