Dan (Muzikman03) texts:

“I just cleaned a D3 sensor. I almost had to re-clean it because of all my drool.”

ROFL!!! True dat, true dat…

=Matt=

Well, I managed to do it again! I shot an event with my cameras out of sync. I’ve got two flippin’ sweet Nikon DSLRs with a way-cool “world time” menu, and somehow I managed to switch only my D300 to east coast time, while leaving my D200 on pacific time. And I was so proud of myself for getting in the habit of synchronizing my cameras down to the very second once every week or two! As amazingly convenient as it is to shoot with two cameras at once, and as critical as it is to have a backup camera, period, sometimes I loathe having to deal with the drawbacks of multiple bodies…

A 3 hour time discrepancy can be DEVASTATING to your image organization, let me tell you… That’ll put your reception photos all jumbled up with your ceremony photos, and you’ll want to shoot yourself just THINKING about how long it’ll take you to manually organize it all.

Well, with 2,600+ images, I told myself there had to be a better way. So, after hunting around on the internet, I started finding programs that can indeed adjust the “time stamp” in an image file’s metadata. Then I discovered that many of them were for Windows only, so I started over searching for Mac compatible programs. After a few programs promised being able to edit the time stamp but could not be recognized by Bridge CS3, I discovered that Lightroom is supposed to be able to do this! Sweet! Well, somehow () my PC’s clock is “stuck” in May of ’07, so I still have some trial period left. I transferred everything to my PC, “imported” (boo) all my D200 images into Lightroom, transferred them BACK to my Mac and viewed them with Bridge CS3, only to discover that the time stamp had gone totally berserk. Some images were still an hour behind where they should be, some were now an hour ahead. Hmm, I guess the initial beta / trial version of LR had a couple bugs?

After burning a half-day on all that fruitless frustration, I decided to just clutter my Mac with the latest version of LR, and downloaded the 30 day trial. Luckily, it WORKED! I still had to go through a whole bunch of import/export nonsense, but it was totally worth it. Since my D200 and D300 WERE INDEED synchronized down to the very second, and I had simply forgotten to tell my D200 it was on the East Coast, the images fell into perfect place once I added 3 hours.

What a relief!

I’m sure there are some of you out there who already knew that LR could do this. Please don’t laugh too hard! Or, even if you do, I’ll be okay because I know there are also people out there who haven’t even shot with two cameras at once and given any thought to this kind of a problem… Oh, the drama of being a professional photographer! But, my clients pay to have the job done right, and as a professional I need to be able to overcome ANY obstacle, right?

Moral of the story: I guess Lightroom is good for something! I just WISH that Adobe would break down and offer a version of Lightroom that doesn’t require importing, or a version of Bridge that has the small features like this, the ability to edit a time stamp. As much as I joke about hating it, LR is a great program with some strong advantages, and I hope that future versions of LR (or BR) bring me closer to workflow nirvana!

Until next time,

=Matt=

PS: Check my main blog (link at the top of the page) for images from this gorgeous Black Rock Mountain (GA) wedding! More coming soon!