I agree with your need to keep the camera on, but I think you are killing your batteries. If weight isn't an issue, apply some technology to the problem. Rig up a harness and wire a set of batteries in parallel to keep the load down on each. It will really help the lifetime of them. With my 300D and an IS lens I still get 400-500 shots out of a battery. You may be happy with only 50 shots, but I think you could easily be much happier and without the high load on your batteries.
If weight really isn't an issue, go with gel cells in series and a regulator. We used to use a similiar trick on our ELPers (an interferometer for locating crashed airplanes) using a pair of 9V batteries and a voltage regulator IC to push the 18V back down to 3V. A 9V battery has to be seriously dead before its voltage falls below 1.5V, so those battery packs were practically immortal no matter what conditions we used them in (planes have a terrible habit of crashing in deep snow in the dead of winter and never on warm sunny days).
On Mon, Aug 30, 2004 at 09:38:05AM +0900, James B.Davis wrote:Fact is, shooting birds or any wildlife, you have to have the camera ready. If I'm in a location and ready to shoot, my camera is on and ready. If I'm ready to move on, and the camera goes back into the bag, it is turned off. I used to have the camera set for auto off to always on and used the switch. But lately I've found the auto off does have it's uses for those times when you're shooting something and you>can turn it on and get ready.
I have 4 IS lenses plus a variety of others; the IS lenses definitely drain the batteries a bit faster but I really don't worry about the difference. Sometimes I get 50 shots per battery, sometimes 350, but again, this is not something that I care about. I always carry enough batteries with me - mostly 3rd party. They are fairly small, light, and are a minor fraction of the weight and cost of my equipment. So when I'm out shooting, I leave the camera on. Saving batteries and not getting a shot due to turn-on lag time seems a really senseless attempt at saving. It's like buying a very expensive camera and lens, and then carrying insufficient film. For my Leicas and Sinars I have film, and for my digitals I have batteries and cards enough.
Fiddling with gel cells and the weight, wiring and maintenance issues also seems truly pointless. This was good technology in the 60's; we've moved past that now. 6 BP511's see me through pretty much everything, are fairly cheap and need no babying. If I have to replace them after three years, so be it.
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