Re-Volting Development - The Powered Menace

I don't wish to alarm you, but many of the cameras in use today contain electricity. Not a great deal, in some cases, but enough to cause concern in certain quarters.

The American Collection Of Concerned Physicians has called for the banning of all electricity - not only in photographic equipment, but in all aspects of life. They cite the troubles in Fukushima and point out that if the Japanese had been content to light their houses with rush lanterns they wouldn't be in the mess they are today. Of course, it is a little mean to scold people who have been caught up in a natural disaster, but the Collection has only their best interests at heart. And physicians scold good.

For the photographic-minded, the electronic camera is the norm today - very few of the mobile phones that people use to snap pictures have enough space for a roll of film. The amount of electricity needed varies as the size of the camera and the features increase. The compact battery is a small wafer that will shoot 200 shots - the big industrial macho camera needs a giant lithium-ion cell that shoots 2000 shots. You are encouraged to recharge these instead of throwing them away.

There are throw away lithiums, however. The Promaster people make a series of cylindrical ones that power older film cameras, light meters, and some accessories. they are the CR1/3N, the CR2, the CR123A, and any number of little flat button cells. These are good value in that they are lightweight for the electrical capacity. But there is a fatal flaw...

Many of the manufacturers of equipment that takes the flat button cells have decided upon slightly different sizes of battery - they all pretty much pump out the same voltage, but inevitably you never have the correct number for the customer's needs. As this is the International Week of Standards - like ISO and DIN and ASA and suchlike - I would like to call upon all right-thinking photographers to grab torches and pitchforks and march up the street to the camera designers and demand that they get their blinking act together.

Me? I'm currently converting my D300s to operate off a Leyden jar. As soon as I can perfect the biological CF card we should be free of the crushing rule of the big manufacturers...

Power To The People - A Battery Of Chargers

Here in Australia there are only three common items to be found in every hotel and motel room - a bed, a Gideon's Bible, and the camera or i-phone charger from the last occupant.

We get calls daily from people desperate to replace lost charger. The variety of different batteries and charger blocks produced by the various manufacturers precludes having one of everything available at short notice. Indeed, some cameras have long outlived the production of their chargers.

The answer has been the Inca and the Hahnel universal chargers, They can be configured to stuff electricity into nearly all batteries - with some exceptions in the Sony range and in some of the newer Canon professional batteries. You generally just drop the AA or AAA cells into the tray or manoeuver the Li-on block onto the blades and let it go for an hour or so. We use 'em all the time here in the shop.

If you just need to do AAA's scoop a couple of the INCA chargers out of the $ 1.99 bargain bin near the door. There are 4 batteries in there as well as the charging block, and the charger doubles as an LED torch or power block for USB devices. $ 1.99 - you couldn't get a punch in the eye in a waterside pub for that price.

If you need to power something up out in the bush and you have your motor car nearby, you can put a can inverter into the drinks holder on the center console and plug in the Powertech  can-size inverter. It can put out 150W steady or 450W at a surge. it also has a USB port to power up tablets. Mind you, if you need to take a lot of tablets in the bush, it is time to slow down, watch the flowers, and smell the bees...

I Need A Battery...

Yes, indeed you do - unless you are going to take all your pictures with a Leica M2 or a Hasselblad 500C/M you are going to need some sort of battery - either for a light meter or a motor drive or a digital camera. Nit-pickers may be able to point out that there has been some sort of photo apparatus that ran from a hand-generator or burning olive oil, but they are welcome to the sort of images it might have  produced - along with the nits...

There are two very boring pack-shots attached to this post - similar packets, similar colours. Observe, Watson, and think about what you see.

The first picture shows a number of different sizes and shapes of battery - from flat button cells to large torch cells. Each one of these has a place in some photo gear - from flash triggers to cameras to speed lights. The cylindrical lithium cells are needed for many of the quite-decent late model film cameras from major manufacturers. They are real powerhouses in this application - keeping their capacity even if they are not drawn upon for months.

If you are going away on a trip with your vintage gear, why not grab an extra one - you won't be able to find it on a Greek island or up the coast of Alaska, so be prepared.

The second picture is the one that's needs the detective mind. All those boxes look the same. Look at the labels. Three different camera camera manufacturer's names appear on a Promaster battery box - and there are 10 different models of battery listed. These are "aftermarket" batteries - produced to fit in with the appropriate manufacturer's battery code and to power the cameras in the same way.

They generally cost less than the batteries marked with the camera manufacturer's name - I do not believe that they are inferior products. Indeed, the editorial Fuji X-10 is powered alternately by Fuji-marked and aftermarket brand batteries and the pictures look the same - the run life of the aftermarket battery is just as good.

That might seem to be a funny thing to say from a shop that sells the branded battery at a higher price and derives a profit from that, but it is true. Please note that the Promaster batteries come in resealable plastic boxes so they can rattle around the inside of a camera bag safely.

I think that any photographer who is serious about their field work needs to take at least one charged spare with them, and travellers would be wise to take two spares as well as the one in the camera. Wedding shooters carry three spares plus three cards of lithium AA cells.

The business of chargers is another topic. You get one in every camera kit, and if you are a traveller you are expected to lose it in a hotel room somewhere on your journey, so perhaps it would be wise to take a spare universal charger as well.