Just one more! Seven tips for squeezing every last shot from your camera battery

posted Monday, November 7, 2016 at 1:35 PM EDT

You don't always have access to a spare battery or a means for charging yours as it drains, but there are steps you can take to squeeze every last bit of power potential from your camera's battery. SLR Lounge's Matthew Saville recently published a list of seven tips to help you stretch your battery life.

First up is turning off your camera's wireless connections. As cameras become more connected, their list of wireless features get longer and longer. While they are nice to have when you need them and have plenty of juice to spare, when you're trying to get through a day of shooting with one battery, those wireless features are more of a nuisance than anything else. Be sure to turn them off when you don't need them.

Image stabilization is another setting that may do more harm than good when trying to conserve battery power, but unlike wireless connectivity, it's not as obvious that it's worth turning off. In-camera stabilization in particular can drain a lot of battery power, so if you don't need it, turn it off! Of course, there's no point in saving battery power to capture more images if the images you're shooting require the stabilization to remain sharp.

Keeping your sensor clean is important, but you don't need to have your camera set to automatically clean the sensor every time you power the camera on and off. If your camera is dead and you're wishing you had been able to capture just a few more shots, you should remember that speck of dust could've been removed during post-processing in a few seconds. So if you don't need to clean your sensor, don't have your camera doing it for you repeatedly.