Rodney Campbell's Blog

So one thing I was really keen on seeing with the new Z7 mirrorless was how good or bad the battery life actually was in real life

Cracks in Space

NIKON Z 7 + 14.0 mm f/2.8 @ 14 mm, 236 sec at f/2.8, ISO 250 + 61 sec at f/2.8, ISO 800 x 98 Frames

One thing that generally stresses the batteries is doing star trails. Taking continuous long exposures (in this case 61 seconds each frame) eats batteries. The camera is basically on and the sensor active pretty much the entire time. In this case it was essentially 100 minutes worth of exposures

With that I only burned one bar of battery (about 25%) which appeared to be roughly the same as Gerry did with his D750

Admittedly I was using a brand new EL15b vs his old used EL15. However I’m still pretty happy with the result and it does give me confidence of useful battery life during normal long landscape sessions

So back to the image…

We’d planned to shoot these continuous exposures not just for star trails but to capture the Eta Aquariids Meteor Shower.

We setup facing slightly north of east with these marvellous cracks in the foreground

We were pointing exactly where we should have been in the sky for the time we were shooting. Alas we had exactly zero meteors across all the shots. In “theory” we should have been seeing 55+ meteors per hour. So zero was, lets face it, “very” disappointing

Still here we were at 3AM on a cold a windy night doing our damnest 🙂

With some joint light painting for the foreground (a 236 second exposure). Blended with the 98 stacked star trail images for the final result and voila

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