It's About Time

Botanical travel can take you close to home or far away, perhaps, the other side of the earth.  The nearest antipodes to me is Port-aux-Francais in the Kerguelen Islands which would be interesting to visit, but it isn’t a place where Primulas grow. My last botanical trip started in Kunming, China after 23 hours of travel and all I wanted to do after landing was to eat and sleep. But in the list of many things you need to do when you arrive, there is one task people forget to do – set the clock on your camera to local time.

Set the local time on your camera

Why would you want to do that? If you are like me, when you get back home you are faced with the daunting task of organizing thousands of images taken on the trip. With the help of photo manager software you can quickly find that special image later on when putting together a presentation or sharing with friends. Some of these programs are free, others you pay for either by buying outright or by renting monthly. I use Adobe Lightroom.

Exif data

Every time you take an image with your camera, basic information or metadata is stored with that image in exchangeable image file format (Exif). The data includes the make and model of your camera and the date and time the image was captured. Photo manager software allows you to sort based on the Exif data included in your images. You can find all the images taken on a particular date or maybe those taken with a particular camera, if you were using more than one (or a camera and a cell phone for instance). If you haven’t set your camera time, some of your images may appear to have been taken near midnight and others the next day, when in reality all of the images were taken in the afternoon on only one day!  If you can accurately sort the images by time, then it makes it easy to find all the images taken at a particular time and add tags to describe locations and plant names to your images. You can also rate your images. With this done, it is a simple task to find your very best images of a plant taken at specific place.

Don’t forget to set you camera clock back when you get home!