Looks like I have a problem with my 7d

My wife and I went to Yellowstone a few weeks ago and I took a lot of photos. I have gone through about 2000 photos now so far and I have had 6 photos that were similar to this one. Does anyone know what is going on to cause this? This was shot with my 7d and 100-400 lens. Looks like I may have a real problem with my camera.

Most likely a bad memory card.

+1 Pretty sure it's a problem with your memory card.

Numenorean wrote in post #16990326
Most likely a bad memory card.

Might be time for a new one

First thought as well, try memory card first.

Thanks for the tip. Is there any kind of test I can do. I have seven different cards I used and I transferred them to a portable hard drive. So I have no idea which card I used.

Nascar Nut wrote in post #16990516
Thanks for the tip. Is there any kind of test I can do. I have seven different cards I used and I transferred them to a portable hard drive. So I have no idea which card I used.

Have you formatted or reused the cards yet? If not, just see which ones have those images on them.

If it only happened to a few frames, I would just use the cards again and see what happens. The dodgy card will probably show up the same way, so just download and check each one individually.

Whilst a bad card is a likely suspect, it could also be anything in the transfer process, a bad lead or the portable hard drive for example. If you spot it again, put that card back in the camera and look at the faulty frames on the back of that. If they still look faulty, it is probably the card, if the fault doesn't show then it is more likely that it is being caused during the transfer process, so probably a lead or card reader if you use one.

It may take a little detective work to trace the problem, but the good news is that it is unlikely to be the camera at fault (but not impossible).

I think getting that close to a mama black bear with a cub is a bigger problem than whatever is going on with your camera. Even at 400mm, you are what 40 yards from her? That is certainly within charging range. Please, be careful.

Getting closer will solve all his issues with any memory card...

I had exactly the same artifact pattern appear on a bunch of my 7D images. I tried another card and it never happened again and that was a few years back.

I also had the same issue. In my case it was a bad quality card reader. Once I replaced the 42-in-1 cardreader for a SANDisk CF Card reader, I never had this issue again.

I have formatted most of the cards but I am going to check the ones I didn't and see if the bad images are on any of those. I am using a sandisk card reader to transfer my files to the laptop and then copy the files from the laptop to the portable hard drive. I did this so I had to copies of my photos just incase while on vacation. I then used the portable hard drive to copy the files to my home pc. I am going to look on my laptop and see if the files are corrupt on it as well. I will get it figured out. As for being close to the bear and cubs the rangers where right there along with a crowd of people. We were between 50 and 60 yards most of the morning. The ranger said this bear stays close to the road as her mom did because the male bears will most likely stay away from her cubs and not kill them because they don't like all the crowds of people. So she is a smart bear.

I had something similar but it was a solid grey instead of the white block with lines. It turned out to be a bad sensor and was replaced.

Looks like it was my portable hard drive. I looked at the bad files on my laptop and they are all good on there. So it must have happened when I transferred the photos from my laptop to backup on my portable hard drive as the files are bad on that drive and those are the files I copied to my home pc to edit the photos.