Lightroom Tip of the Week (5): Multiple cameras and adjusting timestamps in Lightroom

Many photographers use two (or more) cameras while on a photo shoot (e.g. a wedding). In those cases, it pays to make sure before you go out shooting that you’ve synchronised the clocks on both cameras. That way, when you later import the pictures into the a folder in Lightroom, all you have to do is sort them by Capture Time, and you have a chronological account of the whole day. You can even choose to rename the photos coming from your two cameras. You can enter the Renaming Panel by hitting F2 in the Library Module or choosing Rename Photos from the top menu. It’s advisable to use a comination that includes at least the date (preferably the YYYYMMDD format) and an increasing number, and maybe some kind of short description in between. Something like 20090913_Dave_Mary_001.NEF. If later, for whatever reason, you would want to distinguish again between the two cameras, you can always use the Filter Bar to temporarily separate the shots taken with either camera.

But what if you a distracted, clumsy photographer like myself, and you return from a wedding, only to realise that you’ve not followed your own advice, and the timestamps of your two cameras don’t match?  Then, it’s ‘Edit Capture Time’ to the rescue. You can find this feature in the Metadata Menu of the Library Module.

These photos were taken with two cameras (a Nikon D700 and a Nikon D300) without having synched the time settings. I only realised importing, when I found that the different places where I’d photographed weren’t all nicely grouped together in Grid View.

I made a test shot, at the same time, with each camera. This showed me that the time difference between the two was 8 minutes.

In Lightroom, I selected all the pictures that were made with the D700 (I used the Filter Bar to select only those pictures). I chose Metadata => Edit Capture Time and adjusted the Corrected Time by 8 minutes.

The dialog box also caters to other needs, such as shifting date stamps by a certain amount of hours (Shift by set amount of hours (Time Zone Adjust)) which is, as you might guess, handy if you’ve forgotten to change your time settings when on holiday.

This article was adapted from my Dutch-language book ‘Lightroom 2 Ontmaskerd’, that is loaded with tips and tricks like these. The book is published by Easy Computing and available in bookshops across Belgium and the Netherlands. Also available online at www.easycomputing.com or www.hcw.be.