Use of GMT (UTC) Camera/Computer Time Settings

[dsteinauer]

I have been doing a lot of shooting in time zones other than my home (UTC-5, Eastern Standard/Daylight Time). To eliminate the need to reset my camera and/or computer, depending on where I shoot or where I process my images (which I regularly forgot to do), I've adopted the convention of setting my computer and all my cameras to GMT/UTC. Now, all I do is check occasionally that all these settings are synchronized. This has minimized the hassles when combining images from multiple cameras and/or time zones. The one undesirable side-effect is that file renaming (yyyymmdd_nnnn in my case) can get confusing if the shoot straddles GMT midnight.

First, is there some flaw in this procedure? Are there other procedures that, perhaps, don't require such synchronization, but don't require resetting equipment and/or EXIF data all the time? Is this all a case of making a mountain out of a mole hill? (Curious minds -- and confused photographers -- want to know.)

dds

 

[neelin]

I have been doing a lot of shooting in time zones other than my home (UTC+5, Eastern Standard/Daylight Time).

That would be UTC-5.

I shoot always using my local time zone because I'm here more of my life, and probably will be all my life. When I go to other time zones I leave the wacky out of sync time on the camera, etc., and remember when I'm looking at the photo that I have to correct the file name for the locale time. Not perfect, but keeps the anomolies consistent. Can't have any Bradbury/Asimov/Serling-esque time anomolies happening, you know. As for the concept of naming files by time, I can't ever picture naming a file anything more unique.

robert