Hey photographers, do you travel? Do you FLY?

If so, I must ask, do you have a battery grip that accepts AA batteries? You BETTER! Why in the world, you ask?

Because the TSA / FAA just got some new harebrained idea- place restrictions on traveling with lithium-ion batteries. Yep, that’s right, ALL those proprietary batteries that go in your DSLR, video camera, some P&S cameras, etc. etc… You can now pack a grand total of ZERO in your checked luggage, and aside from the ones already in your camera you can only bring TWO spares! They have to be “protected against a short-out”, by the way, which means the whole ziploc baggie routine. Well, my Nikon batteries have little snap-on terminal covers, I dunno about everybody else.

But, DANG, talk about sucky! This means I’ll either have to MAIL my batteries ahead of time, which is impossible for some back-to-back events. Or, BUY MORE spares at EVERY travel wedding I shoot. I COULD try and bring my charger to the wedding and figure out how to work that out, but charging batteries WHILE shooting is never a good situation to be in… And that’s not even considering travel adventure photography, where you could be away from civilization completely for days / weeks on end…

My only real option is to get a battery grip that accepts AA batteries, and stock up on those. Ugh! I already have enough AA’s for my flash units, now I’m going to have like THREE DOZEN AA batteries! But seriously, I mean it’s either that, or buy a couple beat up D70 bodies with the cheapo 3rd-party battery grips, and just use those to hold extra “in-camera” batteries. Which is a very stupid workaround for a very lame rule. Not to mention the fact that I don’t have either of my D70′s anymore…

Okay end rant… Any other travel photographers out there have some suggestions? I guess if I got a battery grip for both my D200 and my D300 that would be four batteries total, and then two spares is 6 total. I might be able to survive a weekend / week on 6 total without having to re-charge… That’s roughly 3-4K JPG exposures, if I’m not using VR all the time… Dooable if I have a hotel to re-charge at every night.

=Matt=