We’ve all had this issue: you’re shooting photos at night and your battery starts to drain quicker than normal. So obviously, you have backups. But you’d be amazed at how you can make a few changes to prolong your camera’s battery life. It all starts with something that I like to call Responsible and Sustainable Shooting. This idea rests on being moderate and is much more in-line with shooting the way that photographers have done when they are careful from the start.
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To make sure that your camera doesn’t struggle at night, do the following:
- Turn off continuous autofocus and tracking: If your camera and lens are constantly hunting for a subject to focus on, then they’ll drain more battery. Set the camera to single autofocus without tracking, point, and shoot. If you miss, try it again. You’re bound to waste far less battery.
- Shoot at a slower frame rate: Shoot one frame a second. You don’t need to shoot five frames a second of a stagnant subject
- Dim the screen: Chances are that you’ve got the brightness settings turned up all the way. Most cameras have an auto setting, but turn that down even more.
- Turn on Airplane mode: Only turn on connectivity when you need to share images to your phone or devices
- Turn off all scene recognition and do things manually: Make the camera do less work and preserve battery by telling it directly what you focus on. This means that you should probably even turn off things like face detection, too. Photographers who shot with DSLRs did this for years. Shoot them that!
- RAW or JPEG?: Are you purposely shooting both RAW and JPEG? Why? You don’t need to. JPEGs will use less processor power to write to the card. RAW will use more. Figure out what you need and stick with it.
- Turn off exposure preview mode: Exposure preview is one of the biggest battery sucks of any camera. Turn it off and shoot with a constant scene. If you read the light meter instead, your camera will thank you, and your brain will thank you later for the exercise. We’re humans; not everything needs to be outsourced to technology
- Lower ISO settings: Higher ISO settings make the processor work harder and make the sensor heat up.