Camera battery life
Questions and answers
dears kindly I have a question that made me Crazy and I sent many E-mails on the website without responding please help me to find an answer,, From where the external flash consumes power ?? from its own batteries or from the camera batteries? because when using external flash the camera produces the half number of photos I mean my camera battery capacity is 500 photos but in case of using the external flash the camera produces only 250 photos ! I also use 18-105 lens in stead of the 18-55 so is that affect the power because I don’t use the kit lens that came with my camera ?! I use a Nikon d3200 now
Remonda
thank you for your question. I am not sure how you have tried many emails as we have not received anything. That is irrelevant and you have finally made it.
External flashes consume power from their own batteries. They do not consume power from the camera as they need a lot more. I am not sure how that happens on your camera. Please make sure we do not talk about a pop up flash as part of your camera as that will definitely use the camera batteries.
Just to improve your performance you can add power to the camera with external battery grip or external batteries for the flash. see below few suggestions.
The use of the lens might influence the power consumption of a camera. for example the use of a image stabilisation system of the lens will impact on the power consumption as all the motors in the lens need electricity to work. Obviously the camera batteries need to support that. Some lenses need more power than others
I hope this helps
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Battery Power in a External “USE” will only use the batteries from the flash unit, even if the flash unit is attached to the camera, (not pop up built in camera flash).
Some good advise for flash power useage:
“Eneloop” batteries made by sanyo are the best they are rechargeable they have 2x types the standard set that will hold 75% of there charge for 3 years !!!! and have a flash recycle time of 3 secs
or the “XX” versions with a much higher flash energy output also rechargeable and holds there charge for some years.
Standard alkline batteries “duracel” “energizer” have a recycle time of about 9 secs 🙁
other alternatives is a compact battery pack designed for your flash unit I use all of the above mentioned the battery packs can last for days…
hope some of this info helps.
Hi Remonda,
Just a little note. Generally, when using a flash off-camera in iTTL mode (Nikon CLS), the camera will need to ‘talk’ to the flash and emits pre-flashes to determine exposure.
I like to switch the AF-illuminator most of the time, even though it helps focusing in low light. This too consumes camera batteries.
The Nikon D3200 does not support commander mode as on other models [eg D7100] this also use camera battery power.
Hope this helps in some way.
Regards,
Robert Chircop
Dears , I want to say thanks all for Help and support but one more Question please to get the point..,I want to know if the 18-105 m lens consumes much more power than the 18-55 m , because when I attach the 18-105 I see an Obvious decrees in the number of photos ??
Remonda
sounds like that is the case.
Dear Christian,
Thanks for help , Remonda