For action, sports and wildlife photography, the ability to use a ‘pre-capture’ mode to secure a series of frames before you’ve fully depressed the shutter button is a huge boon – and one of the most significant advances in the age of modern mirrorless cameras.
Camera manufacturers have different names for this mode; it's called Pre-Continuous Shooting on Canon, Pre-Release burst on Nikon, Pre-Capture on Sony and Pro Capture on OM System, to give a few examples.
But they all operate on a similar principle: half-press the shutter and the camera will continuously buffer a series of frames. Then, when the action happens and you finally press the shutter all the way down, you’ll have captured a few moments before you were able to react – therefore vastly improving your hit rate when split-second timing counts.
For example, my Canon EOS R6 Mark II is capable of buffering 15 frames – or about half a second before the shutter is fully depressed. This is boosted to 20 frames at the larger 32.5MP resolution on the newer Canon EOS R6 Mark III.
One downside of pre-capture modes is that, as the camera is continuously buffering frames, it can eat through battery life fast and lead to your camera overheating more quickly.
While I’ve found the pre-capture mode on my Canon EOS R6 Mark II to be vital for shots where split-second timing is crucial, such as a bird taking off from a branch, my biggest issue with the innovative mode is how the burst of RAW files is saved to the memory card.
While brilliant technology, I’ve found the backend of using pre-capture to be a painful bottleneck.
On the R6 Mark II (and cameras such as the EOS R8 and R10), pre-capture RAW files are saved as a group of shots called RAW Burst. These currently can’t be read by the usual RAW converters such as Photoshop CC or Lightroom Classic CC, and instead need to be extracted manually using software such as Canon’s proprietary DPP (Digital Photo Professional).
While clunky, I’ve actually found the best solution to go into the group of RAW files through the camera’s playback menu, where you can scan through the sequence and extract the frames you want as RAW, JPEG or HEIF files – though this is slow and labor-intensive. But this is the price we have to pay currently to use what is admittedly a game-changing mode.
Some camera manufacturers like OM System produce individual RAW files and I think this is the more convenient way to go that I’d like to see all camera manufacturers adopt going forward. I’m even hopeful that a future firmware update could fix this on my Canon EOS.
(Editor's note: Recent Canon bodies like the Canon EOS R5 Mark II and R6 Mark III have this more conventional method of pre-capture.)
I’ll absolutely still be using the new mode, just sparingly to cut down on the time it takes me to go through and find the best shots.
You might also like…
See our picks for the best cameras for wildlife photography, and the best cameras for sports
