Shooting all of Bolivia on a single camera battery is either a brilliant creative constraint or a fast track to missing the best light of the trip. Brendan Van Son set out to find which one it was.
Coming to you from Brendan van Son, this thought-provoking video follows van Son through 12 days in Bolivia with one rule: one battery charge, and when it's gone, no more photos. He's shooting a Sony a7 IV, which means no optical viewfinder to fall back on, just an LCD that drains power every time he uses it to compose a shot. That detail alone changes the game, because instead of freely framing and reframing, he's forced to pre-visualize using his phone and commit before the camera even turns on. The trip runs from the chaos and color of La Paz down through the salt flats of Salar de Uyuni, across the altiplano, and into the volcanic lagoon country near the Chilean border.
The battery challenge forces a kind of discipline that's easy to talk about but hard to actually practice. At Laguna Colorada, van Son scouts a composition he's been mentally building for a full year, walks out to the spot, looks at the LCD, and walks away from it entirely because the frame isn't working. That's not a small decision when you've been planning a shot for 12 months. Instead of grinding through mediocre frames hoping something clicks, he moves on and ends up at a hot spring creek with a foreground that winds through volcanic reds and pinks, right as the sky ignites. The constraint didn't cost him the shot. It redirected him toward a better one.
What's worth watching closely is how van Son handles the moments where the challenge genuinely hurts him. There are locations, including some he loved from a previous Bolivia trip the year before, where he arrives, can't find a frame that justifies the battery cost, and leaves without shooting. He's honest that this isn't always the right call. Some of those locations might have rewarded patience. The mirrorless battery drain issue is also real and specific: he's losing charge just by searching for compositions, which wouldn't happen with a DSLR. By the final days, he's running on a single bar, rationing shots for astro sessions and trying to track down viscachas in the rocks around Italia Parida before the battery dies completely.
Van Son also raises a question worth sitting with: does shooting less make the photos better, or does it just make you pickier? He's not sure by the end of the trip, and he doesn't pretend to be. His read is that the constraint made the process more enjoyable and more focused, but whether the actual images are stronger than those from his previous Bolivia trip is something he leaves open. He asks viewers to weigh in after comparing the two sets. That comparison, along with the full battery status throughout the trip and what actually happened during the astro sessions near the end, is worth seeing for yourself. Check out the video above for the full rundown from van Son.
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