You might not have as much of a camera problem as a weather problem.
I also had cameras out in the same period and I had 1600 pictures on one camera and over 400 on the other. Remember back in April we had a week of very high winds and you could see the brush waving around in all the otherwise empty pics. I even had one camea shot where a 4 inch dead tree can be seen falling into the open area the camera is watching. I suspect your cameras were thrown off by all that wind. Mine certainly were. Took me forever to look through all the pics and delete the ones that didn’t show anything interesting.
As it turned out, I was too assertive on the pictures per X seconds setting. I looked back at the property logbook, which I did not reference when I set up the cameras back at the end of March.
My best settings for trail and mineral licks seem to be 3MP, 1 picture every 10 seconds. I still get plenty of pics of each deer when watching my mineral licks because the deer tend to linger in the area for several minutes. On a trail I might go 2 pics every 10, but that works out fine too because fewer deer tend to walk by a given point on a trail.
Personally, I don’t see the point of 5, 8, or now even 10+ MP settings on trail cams for close in pictures (anything that can be tripped by the sensor). Yes, I totally see where the higher res is great for “plot watcher” or field scan modes so you have the resolution to be able to zoom in. But for normal pics, 3 MP seems to me to be plenty and that leaves room for over almost 2000 pics on an 8GB card.
Grouse
