Clear Lake Star Trail

Lessons in battery life at Clear Lake

Clear Lake Star Trail
Clear Lake Star Trail

Shooting star shots takes a lot of juice. Often you’ll find people jacking their cameras in to car batteries, generators, all sorts of devices in an attempt to keep them shooting through the cold nights. Me, I just buy more batteries and keep an eye out for when they’re getting flat. A good fresh battery will last me 4 hours, and that’s more than enough for the type of shooting I do.

Except when it doesn’t.

The above photo is a one hour shot because my 4 hour battery died after an hour.

Deanna and I spent the weekend hiking in Napa, sleeping on the edge of Clear Lake. Just for the hell of it, I decided to snap a few star pictures as I passed out. Thank the gods I did. While the picture is forgettable the error I almost made would not have been. We’re off to the Grand Canyon soon and I need all juice I can carry. I know now that you get what you pay for.

My D300 is generally powered a good solid Nikon EN-EL3e power pack. Two years ago I purchased two clones made by an anonymous manufacturer in China. I tested them when they arrived, they both gave me 4 hours of fun.

Original Nikon Battery
Original Nikon Battery
Clone battery
Clone battery

Roll the calendar forward two years and the Nikon (pictured left) is still providing hours of joy. In fact, I tested it last night, and it took 251 one minute back to back exposures before giving up the ghost. That’s 4 hours 11 minutes of pure love.

 

The same testing on battery clone 1 gave me 66 images (1 hour 6 mins for the slow of math), and clone 2 gave me 166 snaps (2 hours 46 mins). So the question to you all is, should you pay $70 for a Nikon battery that seems to last forever (it’s 4 years old now), or $2 for a clone that will only last 2 years?

Comments

One response to “Lessons in battery life at Clear Lake”

  1. Steven Avatar

    Battery life has a lot to do with how they are stored and cared for. I’ve learned that lesson the hard way. Lithium batteries find heat distasteful, and more so if they are fully charged. The strategy is to keep them at 40% charge (however the heck one determines that), and keep them from high temperatures. Neither of these occurred as I kept my equipment in my car over a long warm summer. Result = lot’s o’ dead batteries, name brand and clone alike.

    In fact, I’ve borrowed some test equipment form my employer and run some tests on my dead and nearly dead batteries. I’ve learned a few things that I hope to document real soon now on my blog. (Real soon realistically is several months away now). Meanwhile, big batteries, IMHO, are the way to go. PS Thanks for referencing my blog about that!

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