Extending Your Battery Life

Has this ever happened to you?

You are somewhere, miles away from your home and you see “the shot”, you compose, focus, maybe shoot a couple test shots, meter the lighting… and the battery dies… “insert expletives here”

Well, I thought I would put out a few things to keep in mind for optimum battery life and to help you not every be in the situation above…

Tip 1: Keep the camera LCD Use to a Minimum

The one part of your digital camera that uses up the most power is the LCD screen. Every time you open up this digital display you are presented with a view of what the camera sees in real-time, meaning that the display has to be refreshed multiple times every second to show you the actual photo you will take. Keeping usage of the LCD screen to a minimum will definitely help your charged battery last much longer!

Tip 2: Manage Photos While Your Batteries Charge

Another easy way to cut down on the amount of power drained from your batteries is to wait until you can plug your camera into an AC adaptor before you start to manage your photos inside the camera. This is an important tip to remember - you may enjoy deleting, and viewing your photos on the go, but it will leave you with much less power to take that one photo that makes the outing worthwhile.

Tip 3: Try Not to Use the Memory Card

This tip goes hand in hand with my previous tip. But, it also plays an important factor in keeping enough life in your camera batteries to take those important photos! The camera uses up a lot of power every time that you access the memory card, so keep this in mind before reviewing every photo that you take while relying solely on battery power.

Tip 4: Don’t Mix Different Types of Batteries

Keeping the same types of batteries together can help to conserve power in digital cameras as well as most other battery-powered devices. This is mostly because the performance of older batteries will not be as good as newer ones, and they will drain much faster. Another important reason to remember this tip is that mixing different types of batteries can be dangerous – the batteries can become damaged and even leak, which in turn could end up damaging your digital camera over time.

Tip 5: Let Batteries Run Out

Letting batteries completely run out of power before recharging them can help them to last longer as well as increase their performance. Something that people tend to forget is that just because your batteries aren’t holding enough energy to run your camera it doesn’t mean that they are entirely empty of power.