There’s this anecdote a friend of mine told once.  It was his own experience.  His wife works for the Accounting staff of one of the biggest sports shoe makers in the world, and that company had a promotional event which involved some NBA players at a basketball clinic.  With free tickets, my friend went to the clinic with his whole family.

He’s not really a basketball player, but is into sports, like bowling, badminton, swimming and mountain bike riding.  He’s also a techie for a major computer company.  Besides, that one of his hobbies is photography, he’s had a digital camera since the late 1990’s.

He goes to the event with his whole family and starts using his digital camera.  Shoots with the flash and takes some videos of the events.  And when the NBA players come along the worst thing happens.  He runs out of battery charge.  He checks out his camera bag and he’s got no spares.  He never did explain if he forgot to charge the batteries but he was not very happy.  He didn’t have anyone to blame as this was solely his fault.  The event was set and they’ve planned to be there, and he wanted to take pictures.  Unfortunately, due to an oversight on his part, that didn’t happen.  He went home dejected because he had no pictures of NBA stars.

This just goes to show that even for guys who have been taking pictures for a long, long time, it’s still possible to screw up because of batteries.

For photography in general, it’s a cardinal rule to check the equipment before going anywhere.  In the case film cameras, check that the flash is in good working order and the batteries charge the flash in an acceptable time, typically about 5 seconds.  If it takes longer than 10 seconds, it’s time to change batteries.  It would be pre-emptive to replace batteries at this point, unless you’re willing to wait until the batteries are fully depleted, and in the case of flash units, if it takes longer than 10 or 12 seconds, then the flash might be too weak to light up the picture.  In which case, you would end up with a picture which has uneven lighting (strong at the center and shadowy at the edges) or an underexposed shot, or just a black film.

And whether it’s a film camera or a digital one, it’s always best to bring along spare batteries.  There’s always that feeling that the best shot is the one which was not taken (something like the fish that got away).

For rechargeable batteries, the normal recharging time is 6 hours.  But there are chargers which can fully charge batteries within one and a half hours.

Additionally, it’s better to have lithium-ion batteries rather than nickel-metal hydride (NiMh) batteries.  The older technology NiMh batteries have what’s called battery memory or charging memory.  With these, the battery charge has to be fully depleted before being recharged.  Otherwise, if this keeps happening, the battery will slowly lose recharging capacity.

With today’s electronic devices, with no battery charge, it just doesn’t work.  The alternative would be to plug in the camera to a wall outlet.  Though not every camera can operate while plugged in in this manner.