About Batteries

by Joseph T. Sinclair

Today you can get mem­o­ry cards that will store more of your pho­tos than you can take in a week or a month. So long as you trans­fer your pho­tographs from your phone cam­era to your com­put­er or tablet occa­sion­al­ly, you’re prob­a­bly nev­er going to run out of space to store your photos.

But bat­ter­ies are a dif­fer­ent con­sid­er­a­tion. There’s no bat­tery that will pro­vide you with pow­er for as many pho­tographs as you can take in a full day or on a trip of a cou­ple days. Pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­phers load up on extra bat­ter­ies so that they nev­er run out of pow­er when they go shoot­ing, even for one day. In oth­er words, an extra bat­tery should be part of your stan­dard equip­ment for using your smart phone as an all-around com­pe­tent camera.

Buy­ing an extra bat­tery from man­u­fac­tur­er of your phone can be expen­sive. Yet you can find bat­ter­ies man­u­fac­tured by third-par­ty par­ties that are not only inex­pen­sive but easy to find on eBay and oth­er such online places. While a pro pho­tog­ra­ph­er may need three or four extra bat­ter­ies for his three-pound pro­fes­sion­al cam­era, you’ll prob­a­bly need only one extra bat­tery to ensure that you have enough pow­er for almost any shoot­ing you’ll do in one day.

You also have to fig­ure out how to charge such an extra bat­tery. Point-and-shoot cam­eras come with bat­tery charg­ers, which make it easy to charge the bat­ter­ies you aren’t using in your cam­era. But smart phones don’t come with such an acces­so­ry. The only way to charge your extra phone bat­tery is to install the extra bat­tery in the phone and charge it in the phone. This makes it awk­ward to charge the extra bat­tery. But if you want to ensure you always have enough pow­er to shoot with your phone cam­era, this is some­thing you need to do.

Or, you can buy a phone bat­tery charg­er, even though one doesn’t come with the phone—again avail­able on eBay or such places. You can even buy a solar charg­er for phone batteries.

Note:  iPhones don’t have batteries that you can easily remove or replace. Thus, you will need a portable battery charger for an iPhone.

Anoth­er way to get extra pow­er is to get a device that is a sep­a­rate bat­tery and inte­grat­ed charg­er (portable bat­tery charg­er, portable pow­er bank, pow­er sta­tion, mini pow­er bank, exter­nal back­up bat­tery). From such a device, you can recharge the bat­tery in your phone. You sim­ply car­ry this extra bat­tery device with you, and when you run out of juice in your phone, you plug your phone into this bat­tery just as if you were using the elec­tric­i­ty at home.

The prob­lem with this recharg­ing tech­nique is that it takes time to recharge the bat­tery in your phone. If you’ve run out of  juice and you need to take pho­tos imme­di­ate­ly, this is not a tech­nique that will help. It will be use­ful in mul­ti-day trip, how­ev­er, as you can recharge your phone bat­tery each evening.

Have I ever run out of bat­tery pow­er in a day of shoot­ing with my phone cam­era? The answer to that is, no. The prob­lem is, I’ve nev­er gone out and shot all day with my phone cam­era. If I was going to go out and pur­pose­ly shoot all day, I would opt for my three-pound pro­fes­sion­al cam­era. Going some­place and shoot­ing all day is a real com­mit­ment, and you usu­al­ly will want to have your most ver­sa­tile cam­era with you.

Nonethe­less, I’ve shot pho­tographs for as much as a half-day with my phone cam­era. So far I haven’t run out of juice. But if I was going to go out and pur­pose­ly shoot all day on a pho­to shoot with my phone cam­era, I would take my extra phone battery.

In any event, all this con­ver­sa­tion about an extra bat­tery leads you to remind your­self that you should ful­ly charge your phone every night. That way when you leave in the morn­ing, your phone will always have a ful­ly charged bat­tery ready to take plen­ty of photos.

The delight­ful thing about phone cam­eras is that you always have a cam­era with you, assum­ing you car­ry your phone at all times. The con­ve­nient thing about phone cam­eras is that you can use them for unan­tic­i­pat­ed shoot­ing. That unan­tic­i­pat­ed shoot­ing might be one shot or might be 100 shots—or it might be 1,000 shots. The ques­tion is, will your bat­tery be up to the task? If you didn’t charge it the night before, it may not be.