Long-Life Power Play - 8/27/07

A friend of mine just gave me the best advice I’ve heard in a long time: use AA batteries. Sounds simple, but he meant to get rid of my heavy battery packs that give my flash short recycle times and lots of flashes with every charge. Big battery packs are great, and for years, they were the only way to shoot for an extended time with external flashes without stopping frequently to change batteries. The trouble is, they’re big and heavy and they mean one more thing you have to carry around on every shoot. But the newest generation of rechargeable AAs is ultra-high capacity and can sometimes provide a suitable replacement to those heavy external packs. The trick is to look for batteries with a higher milliamp-hour rating: that’s a number like 2300mAh. The higher the number, the longer they’ll last. Check out the PowerEx 2700mAh from Maha. You can get a fast charger to provide a full charge in under an hour, or go deluxe with Maha’s WizardOne charger/analyzer. Either way, with a rapid charger and two sets of batteries you’ll always have enough juice to power even the hungriest on-camera strobes. Visit www.mahaenergy.com.

Photo courtesy of Maha