How To Keep Your Batteries Charged In Wildlife Photography
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By Simon | 24 June 2022 | 1 Comments

How To Keep Your Batteries Charged In Wildlife Photography


Wildlife photography seems really cool. Photographing in extreme conditions such as jungles, prairies, and deserts. Go out in the early morning, or in the evening as well, start your photo trip to the meadow to look for birds, deer, and maybe foxes if you are very lucky. Sounds like a very good plan. But have you ever considered how nature photographers charge their gears?
 
You need to prepare a whole setup to power your camera batteries, speedflash batteries, drone batteries, laptop, and other stuff, no matter its a shorter or longer trip. Because sometimes youll need more batteries than you have brought. And even sometimes things just kind of go different than youve planned. In this article, youll find some suggestions about how to keep your batteries charged in the wild.
 
Portable Solar Panel
 
In the wild, we are always under unusual circumstances. Say its a trek through the jungle, or a hiking expedition on the Pacific Crest Trail, with no wall plugs, no vehicles. You might find something really nice. Then, you might spend the whole day out and with the cameras, drone, and sound equipment, etc. Their batteries very easily run out. Here, carrying along a portable solar panel is a good idea.
 
Its a smarter choice than hauling a heavy supply of expandable batteries with you. First of all, it provides clean solar energy and is relatively simple to use. Secondly, portable solar power will always keep your electronic devices fully charged while being on the go. It is more expensive than some packs of batteries, but it will serve you much longer and pay off its cost real soon.
 
There are different sizes and charging power in portable solar panels. Just choose the proper one based on the length of your trip. For me, I bought two foldable solar panels, one is small size with 24W and another one is bigger size with 100W. I usually bring the 24W on the short trips and the 100W on longer trips. The foldable solar panels connect externally at least 3 ports, which means they can charge 3 devices at the same time. What I like most was they fold very nicely together so that I can pack them well in my bag.
 
Its nice to be able to have a cup of coffee in the middle of the day, set up your portable solar panel, and then power everything up within quite a short rest time. And dont worry about the windy and cloudy conditions. Everything has turned out to be just perfect.
 
Portable Power Bank
 
If you are planning a longer trip, I suggest using portable solar panels with an external portable power bank. Nowadays, the capacity of portable power banks reaches up to 20,000mAh. They usually have USB-C ports. You can use it for almost everything, like your phone, portable photo storage, camera batteries, headlamp, and everything basically power from USB.
 
Some portable power banks have much higher watts, with the function of manually choosing the output volts. This is very brilliant. They can charge your laptops faster. If plugging in a converter, they can also charge your drone batteries.
 
You can even bring two different power banks. One is for basic USB charging and another one is for the devices that need higher voltages. The portable power banks perfectly complement the backup power based on foldable solar panels.
 
Smart Camera Battery Chargers
 
Actually, the biggest challenge is to charge the camera batteries without the wall charger. Fortunately, you can buy USB chargers for camera batteries. Also, to charge the battery with solar power, a DC power input is needed. Recently there was a special camera battery charger was released on the market. That is the XTAR SN4. Some professional photographers thought it a game-changer. Let me share more information.
 
XTAR SN4 is a 4-slot smart camera battery charger with detachable charging docks. It can charge different types of camera batteries from both the same brand and the different brands. For example, it can charge 4 x Canon LP-E6, or 2 x Canon LP-E6 and 2 x Canon LP-E8, or even 2 x Canon LP-E6 and 2 x Sony NP-FZ100. Currently, it is available for most popular camera brands, such as the Canon EOS series, Nikon D series, and Sony A9/A7S/A7R/L series.
 
For camera batteries, the fact is even different models of cameras under the same brand may have batteries mismatch. The SN4 camera charger solved the embarrassment of different chargers and charging cables mixed together in your camera bags.
 
In addition, It provides fast charging with 3A for a single slot, 2A for two slots, and 1A for four slots, almost 4 times faster than other normal chargers. Another important thing is it uses a USB-C port. You'll never worry about the mismatch of charging cable.
 
There is a unique function on XTAR chargers. That is the activation for most of the dead batteries. Install your dead batteries in the XTAR SN4 and plug the power. It will automatically detect the battery status and charge it with a very small charging current. Several hours later, youll find the voltage of your battery come to normal value.
 
When you are out photographing with the above set up (portable solar panel, power bank, and SN4 camera charger), put the portable solar panel pointing towards the sun at a good angle, and connect the SN4 camera charger. Then you leave it there, find a good place and go photographing. When you come back to have a break, you would have four charged batteries within a few hours. Isnt it extremely helpful? If you have more time, you can even put a power bank installed in a solar panel so that you have a fully charged power bank.
 
Charging on the trips was always a big topic. If you used some other useful charging gears in extreme conditions, please share in the comments.

 

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