Last weekend was labor day weekend. My wife and I had been discussing what we wanted to do for quite some time. One of the options that we discussed was going away for a weekend and taking our boys on a camping trip. We thought it would be fun to get away, unwind, enjoy some time as family, and take a lot of pictures.
As we considered our options and thought about what was needed, two hurdles to camping kept coming to mind. The first was that when my wife and I take pictures, we take a lot of pictures. We can shoot for hours. We have enough memory cards for that amount of time, but typically not enough battery power to fill them. The second, was the thought of my phone running out of power. For safety reasons, we needed it to make emergency calls. For sanity reasons, we needed my son to be able to watch videos when it was time for a nap.
Being away from civilization whilst camping posed the problem of power. With batteries dying daily, we would need a way to recharge everything. Having a solar powered battery charger would solve our problem. Here are a two situations I can think of in which this type of charger would be helpful. These are things I have experienced in the past few months.
- Long photo-shoots – I shot about six hours of photos for a wedding two months ago. With a few hours left for the event, I had already gone through an entire battery. It was getting late, and more power would be needed due to the flash for the night. If I had the option earlier in the day to recharge while shooting outside, I would have avoided the stress of worrying about a dead battery in the middle of first dance. Thank goodness my battery lasted.
- Long days at the park – We spent the 4th of July with some very good friends. Each of the kids wanted a turn playing games on my phone. By 3:00 my phone was dead. I missed out on taking and tweeting pictures of my son enjoying the fireworks show that night. I was in the sun all day and I could have easily charged up.
Wunders in Focus 