Put an Atomic Clock in Your Camera

Fixing Capture Time In Post

Here is process I have settled upon, using Adobe Lightroom:

Creating a Reference Image

Since I am in the United States, I choose to sync my images with "The Official U.S. Time"

I open a web browser, navigate to http://www.time.gov and click on my time zone (Pacific).  The clock will appear, showing the current time down to the second, as well as noting the accuracy (it usually tells me that it is accurate to within 0.2 seconds).

I then photograph this screen with each of my cameras and import those photographs into the same directory as the session/event.

Selecting the Photographs to Adjust

Once this is done, go into "Gallery" mode (press 'g') and make sure you are only looking at recent images that have never been adjusted before.  Ideally, you would only use this process on images you shot today or in the past couple of days.  If you adjust the same photograph more than once, it will no longer be accurate. 

Now, activate the "Library Filter" by pressing the backslash key ("\").  Click on the drop down on the right of the "Library Filter" bar and choose "Camera Info" (or another selection which will provide an option to filter by camera). 

Choose only one camera at a time, so that only images made by that camera will appear in the view.

Library Filter panel in Adobe Lightroom

Select all images (Ctrl+A), then double-click the photograph of the "Official Time" to make it the active image, and press "g" to go back to the Gallery view.

Now (with all images from a single camera selected), click on the Metadata menu, and choose "Edit Capture Time":

Edit Capture Time dialog in Adobe Lightroom

The type of adjustment should be "Adjust to a specified date and time".  Now set the "Corrected Time" to match the time you see in the thumbnail on the left, and click "Change All".  This process will note the difference in time between what the camera recorded and the "New Time" you specified and that difference will be applied to all of the other photographs.  

Hint: if the thumbnail is too small to be able to see the exact time, cancel this process, crop the image, and start again.

If you were using multiple cameras, just repeat the process for each camera and all your photos will reflect the exact time at which they were actually created.

Of course you can also use this process any time you need to have an accurate timestamp in your photographs (e.g. documentation of evidence or synchronization with a GPS log) whether or not you need to synchronize multiple cameras.

If you don't have Lightroom, and you are not afraid of using command line applications, it is possible to  use the free "exiftool" to adjust your images.  In fact, I used exiftool to adjust the images from my first wedding.  It is a lot more tedious, but it's free.  Of course, a 30-day trial of Lightroom is also free.

--Nathan Chilton
Nathan Chilton is a portrait and wedding photographer, living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, east of Sacramento, California.
 

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