Power Organization

There's a little bit of spring cleaning going on in the studio. One of the most annoying aspects of my Strobist activities is that there's always batteries needing to be charged for cameras, flash units, and everything else. I counted seven power adaptors on my desk, for computer, phone, hard drives, plus a load of battery chargers. This was taking up way too much valuable real estate in my already cramped quarters.

My solution to this problem was to commandeer one shelf of my equipment store and make it into a "charging station". I fixed a power strip, the Maha charger's adaptor, and all unnecessary lengths of wiring under the shelf, leaving the top free for the charging units and batteries. This is what the underside of the shelf looks like:

The power strip is mounted onto a board (to keep wires from projecting too far down into the lower shelf space), the excess lengths of wiring are tucked in the plastic conduit, and the Maha power adaptor is secured with a Velcro strap. The output leads are fed through holes drilled in the shelf.
And the top looks like this:

So it is all neat and tidy. This arrangement also has the advantage that if I go on a road trip, or off on a long day's shoot, I can bring the entire shelf - everything is strapped or Velcro-ed in place.
The plastic battery boxes keep the same sets together, and contain flags of card, green on one side and red on the other, which indicate whether the batteries are charged or not. The flags also go into the Nikon battery covers, and my CF card cases to let me know whether a card is blank or not.

Now, as to the rest of the spring cleaning... I'll leave that to another day :)