This is one of those items that I tend not to think about as much because up until this past year I hadn’t used with it very much. Over the last couple of years I have started to use my SB-900 flash more often with my Aviation projects and this past year I have been using it a lot with my portrait projects. Now I’m not Joe McNally when it comes to bending the light around a building, down a flight of stairs, through a couple of pipes and onto a ballerinas face, but I know how to use a basic setup. I.E one flash. For my upcoming trip lighting is important with both the video projects that I will be working on as well as the portraits that come up. After the wedding shoot I did back in July I knew that I needed to upgrade the AA Rechargeable Batteries I was using. I had heard of one that was good, Watson.
I went out and bought an 8 pack of AA’s and an 8 bay charger. Now I just got them and only had time for a couple quick tests on the batteries themselves. The first one I did was pretty simple, I turned a flash light on to see how long they would last. 3hours. Not bad. I did a series of product shots over a 2 hour time period, ended up being about 300images. Not bad. So far everything seems good but the real test will come in the field which I will hopefully be able to blog about when I get back. On the other hand I can say with confidence that the charger is AWESOME! This charger is supper light weight and not bulky. Not only does the 8 bay allow for any number of batteries to be charged at once, it shows where the charge is at. Now here is my favorite part, there is no brick power supply. What you see above is what comes with the charger. That little charger is all it takes. That’s huge! Right there is a big reduction in weight. That is a major selling point. Lastly, I don’t know about any of the rest of you but I tend to drop batteries a lot and when it’s dark out it’s hard to see black batteries, but bright blue is pretty darn obvious. If you’re looking for new batteries I suggest you go look at Watson.