The title sounds more ominous than the truth. Darn writers and their enigmatic hooks!
November 1 is the day your camera needs to be set back for Daylight Saving Time’s end. If you have more than one camera, you might consider syncing them all up at this time.
Twice a year, in the US anyway, the appearance and disappearance of Daylight Saving Time causes us to un-sync from those digital devices not able to keep up on their own. As the end of DST approaches consider resetting the clock in your camera. Why? Here are a few very good reasons.
1. If you shoot with multiple cameras at the same event your images won’t display in chronological order when combined. Who wants those embarrassing reception photos mixed in with the bride-and-groom’s kiss?
2. If you rely on previous year’s images to determine when sunrise will poke through the rock formation, you might be disappointed, or even worse-late. (Even worse is to be early. There is nothing like sitting in the cold dark waiting an extra hour for sunrise.)
3. Your camera’s time stamp has likely drifted since you last set it. These, after all, are precision instruments-but they aren’t precision time-keeping instruments. (Who knows, you might have even missed leap-year last time. You might have not set your camera when you took it out of the box new either)
4. It is easy. Many cameras will reset by virtue of having their software installed on your local computer and plugging them in via a USB cable. It takes me under 3 minutes to set 4 DSLRs, 2 Compacts, and 2 video cameras each half-year.
Automatically setting the camera’s clock in EOS Utility
Daylight Savings Time ends on November 1st, 2009 at 2:00 AM. Bleary-eyed Rikk will stay up and do all his gear at that time. You can probably do it before you go to bed or after you get up the following morning.
Most cameras aren’t smart enough yet to do this for us like our computers do automatically. Help them out.
Rikk Flohr © 2009
Strobist info on the Bleary-eyed Rikk Photo:
Shot with Canon 20D on Manual. F8@1/60th @ ISO 200. Canon 580EXII Flash on manual at 1/32nd power. Gelled with 1/2 CTO. Ambient CFL with Cobalt Blue Gel wrap on the lower spill. Fired by Alien Bees Cybersync. LED time stamp added in post production.
Great reminder! We just synced before a wedding last weekend…we better do it again this weekend.
BTW, it’s Daylight Saving Time…only one “s.” Edit: Right you are!