Extending Battery Runtime

Centrifuge. 850 × 40 second exposures, D800E Nikkor 14-24. 9.5 hours of consecutive shots.

The image above was shot over an 11 hour period (some shots at twilight for the foreground and 9.5 hours of star shots once the sky was completely dark), getting a camera to run for this amount of time can be a challenge.

The main thing stopping me from switching over to a Nikon Z8 is the reduced runtime, it would make shots like this impossible without using an external power source.

When shooting startrails I’ve always gone for either my D800E or D810 with a battery grip. I use the Nikon EN-EL15 in the camera and D4 EN-EL18 type knockoff battery made by DTSE in the grip. With this setup I could easily shoot for 10 hours in cold conditions and have a decent amount of charge left in the grip, with the EN-EL15 untouched.

D800E and D810

DSTE EN-EL18 knockoff

I’ve recently sold both of these cameras and now only have the D850. I have a battery grip but the DSTE batteries dont play well with the Nikon grip. I’ve read that I can make the DSTE batteries compatible by swapping to the genuine Nikon endcap, but I’m not confident that I can remove the old caps without damaging the batteries.

I could go for the genuine Nikon battery but they want $180 AUD for the battery and $400 AUD for the charger I prefer not to be robbed so I’m just running two EN-EL15As - one in the cam and one in the grip.

I’ve recently purchased some EN-EL15C batteries, the latest revision for the Z series cams, these are rated at 2280mAh vs the older EN-EL15As that are rated at 1900mAh, so I should see some improvement running two of those, but haven’t tried them in the field yet.

Nikon EN-EL15A

Nikon EN-EL15C

The D850 seems to drain batteries a little bit faster than the older cameras, probably due to the increased processing power.

There’s been a few instances when shooting in cold conditions where I’ve returned to my camera and found that it shut down an hour earlier due to depleted batteries, this isn’t big issue, visually there’s not much difference between a 9 hour trail and a 10 hour trail.

The D850 has the option to shoot the entire sequence with mechanical or electronic shutter, the electronic shutter has some advantages relating to reduced shutter wear, but I don’t see much of a difference when it comes to runtime. The tests I’ve done the mechaincal shutter ran for around 20 minutes longer than the electronic shutter. I expected to get better runtime out of the electronic shutter (no physical movement of the shutter required), but it requires the use of the built in intervalometer which seems to offset that saving.

Some cameras can drain their batteries a lot quicker than the D850, especially if there’s a lot of charge cycles on the batteries. There are some settings that can make a difference to power usage and get you some extra runtime, here’s what I run when shooting startrails. The menus shown are from to the D850, but there should be equivalent settings to most of these in any DSLR.

Image review: OFF

Image quality: RAW (RAW + JPG doubles the amount of writes to the memory cards)

Secondary Slot Function: Overflow (there is a risk of losing your images in the event of a card failure, so you might want to keep this set to backup)

Active D-Lighting, Long exposure NR, High ISO NR, Vignette control, Auto distortion control, Portrait impression balance: OFF

No need for any in-camera processing, it can all be done in post. These don’t work on RAW images so if you’ve set Image quality to RAW then these probably don’t matter, I have them off regardless.

LCD Illumination: OFF (this is for the top LCD’s green backlight and the backlit buttons)

Lacation data: OFF (this only works on a D850 if you have an external GPS device connected)

Airplane mode: OFF (this turns off WI-FI, and Bluetooth functions)

Send to smart device: OFF (I would expect this to be covered by Airplane mode but it doesn’t seem to be the case)

I haven’t tested the difference evey one of these settings makes, I just turned of anything that could potentially reduce the runtime that wasn’t essential to the shoot.