It is important to set the right time and date on your camera after you change location. It is always good to know when you took that special shot whether it was sun rays in the right position, fishes mating or other animal behaviour you’re trying to capture which may only occur at a specific time of day.
If you look at your images later you will always know exactly what time you took that shot of the manta with the sun rays at the perfect angle, or of that fan on the wall. It might be crucial to know what time those frogfishes mated – if you set the right time on your camera this will be easy, because it gets embedded in the metadata of every image. There will be no speculation about when the sun is right, you will know with 100% certainty by looking at your images, and you can then decide to go back to a particular location at exactly the same time, or try at a later or earlier time if the sun wasn’t right.
If you don’t check the date at all, it could even indicate the wrong month or year, which could lead to problems when trying to submit your image to a photo contest.
If the time stamp on your images is wrong and you’re using Adobe Lightroom, you can adjust the capture time like this:
In the Library module choose:
Metadata – Edit Capture Time…
You then have different options, if you just didn’t set the time difference from your home location, you can choose: Shift by set number of hours (time zone adjust) and just dial in the number of hours – and then click change.
If the time is completely wrong (because of a camera reset), you can Adjust to a specific date and time.