Photo Grab Tips
Tip #1 in a series
If you are getting into photography as something more than just a hobby, a few tips could make the difference between paid vacations with retroactive micropayment values or dreaming of paid photography at a turtle’s pace. Use these tips to make your next foray into Microstock photography session more productive and more efficient.
The monetary value of the $1.79 investment could be a Microstock micropayment multiplied by every picture you could have taken on extended photo image grabs. If I could go back in time and put some of these beauties in my pocket I could have made the image grab from a few months maximize to a year’s worth of micropayment eligible photography.
1. Use Hand Warmers to Heat Batteries
Oh the pictures I might have taken if I had only figured this out a year ago. The best days to shoot are often the most clear and cold. But cold in some places are less than twenty degrees. Although I had used pocket warmers like for football games and hunting, my focus was not on the photography conditions. The batteries were losing almost 75% of their energy in the cold.
While traveling in Portland, Oregon I saw some of the most compelling and beautiful scenery ever. There was a city on a river, a great bunch of new architecture to photograph. I was thrilled and high on that drug only journeyman photographers know. But when I set out that morning I was sure 10-12 AA batteries would be enough for at least a morning of photography.
I explored a beautiful and appealing new metropolitan city, Portland, and saw so many amazing things to photograph I may have gone through something like 200 AA batteries. But the best photo grab came from a day when it was so cold my hands couldn’t hardly handle the batteries. If I had brought these pocket warmers I might have been able to get the right angle or wait until cloud cover cleared in extreme cold conditions.
The basis for this amazing testimony, is that for the umpteenth time I saw a shot and grabbed for the camera. But the batteries were dead, giving me that hated red light. But sometimes IÂ get the feeling the battery life has not given me my money’s worth. Tossing batteries without extracting full value is a waste and a landfill burden. But the solution is at hand.
All you Microstockers-if you cuddle a pair of batteries with one of these fully heated pads for about 5 minutes or so, they will recapture the charge. I was surprised to see that after bundling the two “dead” batteries I had in my camera into the fold of a pocket hand warmer, and holding it in my hand, the camera suddenly had as many shots left as I wanted.
Not one, and then two, but a series of 8 or 10. I snapped the camera off before the red battery power light warning came on. I was stunned. I spent last winter with some days unused pocket warmers in pockets of my laptop case and cold dead batteries lying in a pile in my jacket pocket. The $1.40 investment could have delivered hundreds of dollars’ worth of shots.
As God is my witness, I will never be without power for that last shot again.
