After your camera and your tripod the third and final video in this section has to do with camera accessories. Now there are several I'm going to show you here in the next few minutes. And I'm actually going to break this up into two parts your mandatory accessories which I feel you absolutely have to have with you on every shoot and some optional accessories which I think will make you a better shooter if you decide you wanted to use them. The key point here through all them though, is that you can't miss anything as a shooter, you can't have a situation where you miss the play because something went wrong a battery died. It's just unacceptable. So all of these things will help you see the field better here better not run out of tape or anything like that.

So these are all important. We're going to go through them one by one starting with the mandatory which there are three and we'll start right now. Yes, the first thing I want to talk about is camera batteries. And I have two what are called bricks in my hand right here. These are six to nine hour battery so that I know with one of these in my camera, there's no chance I'm going to run out if the game runs long. Even if one does I might know about it.

I can switch out at half time or at the end of the third quarter, there is no way I'm going to run out of battery that is an excuse that doesn't fly with anybody. You must have extra batteries in your bag in addition to the one, it's in your camera. Now some of you are probably saying, I don't have to worry about batteries I plug my camera in. And so that I say that's a risky proposition. I personally would never recommend anybody plug their camera in. Unless you work for a school and shoot at the same place every time and know where there's an outlet that might be indoors that you can run a cable to.

There's no reason why you should be risking showing up with AC power and hoping you're going to be able to get electricity because sometimes you won't, it'll be off. Sometimes it rains and you don't want to have something plugged in when it rains. Sometimes you have to move your camera you might not have an extension cord long enough, you might have someone knock out the plug. There are a whole bunch of reasons why AC power is not a good idea. So again, batteries, extra batteries, fully charged are the most important thing you can have with you. And if you're shooting with an iPad or an iPhone or something like it, make sure it's fully charged.

Before you go out, it's also good to have a backup portable charger. So if you start running low, you can plug that in and get some juice that way. The second item we're going to talk about is media place to hold your footage. Back in the day we used mini DV tapes which had a limit of 60 or in this case 80 minutes. And if the game ran long and you ran out of tape, you had to quickly pop the tape out and put another one in. That's not the case anymore with memory cards like these, which I use in my camera and you might use something similar in yours.

If you get something higher than a 16 gigabyte card you should have three hours of footage which should be plenty, however, bring an extra one always have at least two sources of media, maybe a third one hidden in your bag somewhere in case of a dire emergency. Because you cannot run out of footage. You cannot have something happen to this where it goes wrong or gets faulty and you just can't have your game end because you don't have footage so make sure you have extra media all the time. And as far as your tablet or phone goes, be sure you've got adequate space to hold at least an hour of footage, if not more. Rain protection is the third and final item that I would say is mandatory because if you're shooting outdoors and it starts raining and the players are still playing, you have to keep shooting, you can't tell a coach that you have to shut down because of the rain you have to keep shooting.

So you have to have something to protect yourself. For a small camera like a camcorder I've seen people take plastic bags like from a supermarket and mold them around their camera. I've seen people take Ziploc bags and cut a hole in them and fit them over the camera. But for larger cameras like the prosumer camera I showed you, I have a professional rain cover for mine and this allows me to fit right over the camera as I'm going to show you in a later module. And I can keep my camera covered with the lens still exposed. Then of course you have the old fashioned way.

And that's an umbrella. Some people I've seen trying to shoot with an umbrella. The problem with that is you have to hold the umbrella with one hand. That's one less hand you have to shoot with. So you're using One hand which limits your ability to control zoom or other functions. Plus, if you're dealing with a lot of wind, which usually accompanies rain, you've constantly got this thing blowing around and it's really hard to shoot with one hand while holding a windblown umbrella in the second, but one way or another, you have to have some sort of protection for the rain.

So make sure you don't show up for a game without a Ziploc bag, a plastic bag and umbrella or a rain cover. Otherwise, you're gonna have to shut your camera down and you may even do some damage to it. So protect yourself from the rain.