Flying and photo batteries

- A while ago, I did a course on travel gear and workflow, wherein I gave a bunch of tips and explanations of the best way to pack your camera and your computer and all of your photo gear for travel. Most of what's in that course is still completely valid, and you should absolutely go watch it a bunch right now, well, I mean after this. Anyway, I want to go over a couple of things that have changed since then because there have been some changes, both in terms of the law when you're traveling and in terms of the gear that you might be traveling with. One of the biggest areas of changes has to do with batteries.

If you're taking a computer and a couple of cameras and, in this case, maybe a drone also, you're carrying a lot of batteries. Throw in a flash that might be running off of rechargeable double As and maybe an audio recorder and so on and so forth, you can be carrying a tremendous amount of battery technology. Almost all of the batteries I use right now are lithium batteries, and lithium batteries need to be taken on an airplane in a very particular way these days. I recently took a trip to Kenya, and I took two cameras, a drone, an audio recorder, a computer, an iPad, a Kindle; I had a flash; I had a lot of rechargeable batteries; I had a gimbal that was battery powered.

I had to carry on every single one of those batteries because they were all lithium batteries, and you should not check lithium batteries. They have to be carried on, and they have to be carried on in a very particular kind of case, and, depending on the size of the battery, you may be limited as to how many you can carry. Lipo bags, like this one, this one's Lipo Guard, I got this off of Amazon, these are fireproof bags. They've got a-- (velcro ripping) Really, good strong-- (velcro ripping) Wow, this is kind of embarrassing. Really strong velcro closure, and it's just a bag inside.

I took all of my camera batteries. I took all of my rechargeable double As. I took any battery that I could find in any gizmo and stuck it in here and put it in the backpack I was carrying on. This was a very heavy bag. I had to not carry some of the things that I would normally carry. I had to check some lenses and some other things because I didn't want the extra weight, and I needed to be able to carry the batteries on the airplane. For my drone, which is a DGI Mavic, which uses these batteries, I actually found on Amazon these specific bags, bags tailor made for this battery, which is really nice. I bought one of these for each of my batteries, and these actually just fit in my drone case very well.

This is not an optional thing. This is not me going, "Oh, I'd like my batteries "to be safe while I'm traveling." You can get busted for not having your batteries in a fireproof container. The problem is, what they're worried about, is lithium batteries can swell and burst into flame, and they don't want that happening on an airplane for some reason. It's very important that you start, for international travel, taking your batteries out and socking 'em away in the right kind of storage and carrying them on. Now, this is a very large battery that's used to power certain types of lights.

It actually uses a standard interface. It can be used to power a lot of different things. If you look at the back of this, or any other battery, you will see a rating for its capacity, measured in watt hours. You are allowed to take any number of batteries on board that have a rating of under 100 watt hours. Above that, you're only allowed two, so we can only take two of these on board. Not only that, they have to be drained, and they have to be in the right kind of storage container. In this case, it comes with a box that you can use that's legal to carry onboard the airplane.

If you've got a bunch of these, you my be in trouble because you can only carry on two at a time. You'll need to maybe divide them up amongst different members of your crew or give them to a family member you're traveling with, something like that. These batteries, these are typical camera batteries. These all come in at under 100, so I can carry as many of these as I want. It's funny, some of the DGI batteries weigh in at 99 watt hours. The cut off is 100, and that's very intentional. That's so you can legally carry as many of them as you want.

Take this seriously next time you go on an international flight. Don't forget to take batteries out of things. Not just because it's safe and you're going to be on the airplane too, but because at the security desk, they will take your batteries away from you; you don't want to lose expensive batteries. You don't want to not be able to use your gear when you get to your destination. I want to say one more thing about drones. It's really worth doing a lot of research into an international destination before you take a drone there. I got really lucky. I was going to Kenya, and I took my drone in and didn't have any troubles getting through security.

It turns out, it's, at the time, was actually illegal to take a drone into Kenya. The law changed while I was there. Because I had this fold up drone, I think they just didn't recognize it in my bag, but while I was there, the law changed. I don't think that was because of me, but they changed the law, so now it is legal to get them in and out. There are still a lot of restrictions of where you can fly, just as it is here in the states. Check the laws. Not only do you want to find out where you can fly, you want to find out if your drone's going to be confiscated at the border.

You can find stories online of people saying that their drones were confiscated going into Nicaragua, going into Cambodia, going into Thailand, so you're really going to want to look into that carefully. Unfortunately, there's kind of no standard thing you can look for when you're doing a Google search; however, DGI and some of the other drone enthusiast forums are good places to search for people who've already traveled to particular places with their drone. They'll maybe be able to give you an answer on whether or not you're going to be able to do it. Travel is very different now when you're carrying a bunch of this high tech gear, but for the time being, if you pack right, and if you're smart about following the law, you should be able to get your stuff to the places you want to take it.