We were meeting with a group of photographers on zoom last night discussing an upcoming bear photography workshop, and a good question came up. First, how many flash cards to bring, and second, what RAW format to use to maximize flash card space.
First, in terms of wildlife trips, expect to shoot more than you think you will. Folks who go to Africa, or to photograph bears in Alaska, can shoot thousands of images a day. It is not uncommon on a wildlife trip to shoot 4000-8000 images a day. You want to shoot at a fast frame rate so you don’t miss any action, so at 20-30FPS it is not hard to shoot a thousand photos really quickly. If you are worried about card space and shooting at slower frames per second, you might miss the one incredible moment of behavior or action with your wildlife.
Shooting a 45MP camera like the Z9 and cranking out thousands of frames a day can really fill up card space quickly. On a landscape or travel workshop I may only fill up one 256GB card, but on a wildlife trip I might fill up 2 TBs of card space (4 512GB cards). But just how many photos is that? It all depends on what RAW compression format you use (assuming you shoot in RAW, which I would recommend).
All cameras have different RAW compression choices. They range from lossless compressed resulting in the largest files, to high efficiency compression which significantly compresses the file and can reduce some file quality in the process. Is there a middle solution? Yes! Most cameras have an option called cRAW, and for Nikon users this is called High Efficiency (Star..look for the star symbol beside the name). These compressed RAW formats reduce the file size, but don’t affect the file quality to any noticeable degree. There have been numerous comparisons online by photographers trying to see a difference from the lossless compressed (best file quality, but huge files) compared to the high efficiency compressed files, and no one is finding a significant difference.
My own experience with Nikon High Efficiency (star) files is similar. In real world shooting I can’t see any benefit to using lossless compressed compared to the high efficiency files. Using my Z9 with lossless compressed I get approximately 5.7 thousand images on a 512GB card. When I use High Efficiency (star) I get approximately 13.3 thousand images on a 512GB card, that is twice as many images! Do your own experiments to see if you can find a difference between compression formats. I think a big reason many Nikon photographers didn’t adopt the High Efficiency (star) compression format was it wasn’t supported by some software like DxO or Topaz. But now those software packages, and Adobe, all support this format.
Which brings us back to the first question, how many flash cards to bring on that wildlife trip? If I take 4 512GB cards which record about 13,000 raw files using High Efficiency Star (or cRaw for other camera brands), that gives me 52,000 images, plenty for most of my wildlife photography trips. If you download and backup your images each night, you may not need as many flash cards. But I use flash cards as one part of my backup strategy, so I don’t reformat cards in the field, I wait until I get home. Right now some 512GB flash cards from Sandisk and Lexar are running about $160 a card, pretty cheap for CF Express flash cards. Whatever you do, make sure you have enough flash cards for that bucket list wildlife trip! Happy shooting!