18 Days to Burning Man.
Then – 7 days completely off the grid.
Dream or Nightmare?

At first, the thought of dragging my delicate camera equipment into an area notorious for 110 degree heat, fierce lightning and sand storms, and fine alkaline “playa dust” made me shiver. Then I also realized that without a convenient wall outlet to plug my camera battery chargers into, I’d be out of business after a couple of days of shooting. Which was a bigger bummer than the heat, storms, and dust put together.

So a few weeks ago, I started researching my options. Sure, Burning Man is a place where people share – and RVs with generators and such will be plentiful, no doubt. I could probably sweet-talk someone into letting me plug into their power supply every so often. But – I really didn’t like the idea of mooching of my brethren. Radical Self Reliance is the Burning Man theme after all.

Then, what else is there? With the help of a couple of gearhead colleagues, I was able to distill these options for remote power supplies for the wilderness:

1. The External Battery Pack: The Digital Camera Battery store will sell you this nifty long-lasting battery pack that can power both your camera and flash for a long, long time. It’s small and has a belt clip and a cord, and is rechargable.
Price for the smallest, 40Watt unit = $320. Add to that $70 for the cable, and at least $99 for the car charger. Total = $510

Ouch. Not. Next!

2. The Solar Option: Yes – seize the power of the SUN! This is waaayy nifty – a 5 Watt solar panel charger for my Canon BP-511 camera batteries = $100. But wait – for only $25 more, I can get the 10 Watt Solar Panel. And man, for yet another $45 more, I can get the rollable 5 Watt Panel! For $260, I can even get the 10Watt rollable panel.
And then there is the cool iSun charger – so cute and small, and even lets me charge my AA batteries for the flash too. Damage = $160.

Sigh. That would be nice. But there’s gotta be another option too. And, yes, of course there is. In true cheap-hipster form, this is the solution I came up with:

Canon BP-511 Camera Battery charger with AC plug: $12 (including shipping)
High-powered AA battery charger, with 8 2300mAh rechargable batteries, and an AC plug: $60
Add to that one of them portable power units that will jump your car and has an AC plug (which I can use to plug my chargers into): Freebie! (with the last set of tires I bought at Costco)
Total damage: $72

Not bad. But I suppose I’ve yet to see if this truly works. If not, there’s always the Media Camp at Burning Man where I could charge my batteries (so I wouldn’t have to sell my body to some random RV people – as was pointed out to me by a helpful fellow photographer … .

But in any case – this has been educational already, and I suppose can be considered as part of my gift back to the BM photo community. If anybody has any other ideas (or knows for sure that mine won’t work, leave a comment.