Available Dark Requires a Light
Foto.Feola.Friday for March 20, 2026
Can you face the fire
When you see me there?
Can you feel the fire?
Will you love me in the dark?
In the dark?
In the dark?
Foto.Feola.Friday
Why do rechargeable flashlights look they are stuffed with old-school alkaline batteries?
Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.
I’ve been noodling with a new photo series called Available Dark, out shooting after the sun sets, seeing what’s interesting with the extraordinary low-light capabilities of the Pentax K-3 III Monochrome. I’m wandering with the Monochrome set to ISO 100,000.
Which is enough light for the Monochrome, but not always enough for me to wander without breaking a leg. So I started carrying a flashlight. At first I started carrying one of the rechargeable flashlights I’ve been recommending for Every Day Carry for a while.
And they’re great for around the house; I have a half-dozen of them, and I just leave them wherever they are handy. But they are basically an old-school AA battery flashlight with a rechargeable battery swapped in; not easy to use while wielding a camera, and way, way too bright when you are trying to preserve your night vision.
Stuffing new tech into the old tech’s design is always the story. Take the transistor radio: Akio Morita was struggling to listen to a baseball game on his transistor radio. Frustrated, he goes back into his office, shows that radio to his engineers, and the co-founder of Sony asks the billion Yen question:
Why do we build radios like this? He gets the answer every CEO has heard at some point: Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.
Tube radios were big and heavy and large, and big powerful speakers fit them perfectly. Transistor radios were small and could run on batteries, making them practically portable. But they only had room for a tiny tinny speaker that turned music into mush. Morita told those engineers to start with a clean sheet of paper and come up with a new design.
They came up with the Walkman.
I wondered if anyone had gotten around to a clean-sheet design for rechargeable flashlights. Good news! They have, and they are perfect for photographers!
The RECHOO Flat EDC Rechargeable Flashlights weigh less than a pair of AA batteries, have a clip for hands-free work, a magnet in the bottom for even more hands-free options, a regular flashlight mode with the LED in the top, and a lantern mode with the LED on the side.
And best of all for photographers, it has a red LED for night mode, which protects your night vision. Here’s a RECHOO Flat in night mode attached by the magnet to the center stanchion on my copy stand:
These little flashlights are perfect for photographers because they are so light you can clip them to a T-shirt, a camera strap — anywhere, really, without dragging anything down. They’re bright, have terrific battery life, and are ridiculously cheap — $17.99 for a pair of them. I’ve bought a bunch and clipped them on all my camera straps. And I’ve added them to my EDC recommendation list.
A request from your humble scribe: The above links are Amazon affiliate links; they don’t cost you anything extra and I get a small commission. I’ve set up a little Every Day Carry affiliate store; it would be a real help for me if you use these links. Thanks!
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Sunday March 22 — The next Spielberg is a kid with a laptop; AI is enabling entire new classifications of jobs by eliminating the need for supporting infrastructure — and all those old infrastructure jobs. Movie moguls can now be solopreneurs. So can software moguls. The age of corporate dinosaurs is ending; welcome to the rise of the solopreneur.