Dear fellow shooters,
first to anyone following this blog who has been looking for updates, I've been "more than just a little bit busy" being the Picade Chairman, managing our image archive, working on image metadata for SAA, and developing our customer oriented Picade website that we hope to put online very shortly. Sorry!
Sometimes you know and do simple things without thinking that other people seem never to have thought of and that make a big difference. I'll apologize in advance to anyone who already knows these little shortcuts, but they are someof the little things that I do that is a significant bit of a help in image and image copyright management, that I just mentioned to somebody else who did a dumbslap to his forehead and a loud "OH S**T!!!" exclamation when he heard it.
Most professional digital cameras seem to come with application software that allows you to embed the camera owners name into the camera itself, and most of these same cameras embed that information into every image made on the camera whether jpeg or raw: I know personally that the Canon 10D, 5D, 1Ds, ... all do from personal experience, and that you can do it to at least some of the Canon "Point and Shoot" Elph's.
The first tip is very simple: instead of entering just your name into your camera, enter a copyright notice - my current one (set as part of my January 1 list of things to do) is "©2008 Michael Beasley" set using the Canon Remote Capture utility or the Digital Photo Professional application (which uses the Remote Capture Utility). Thereafter, every image that is made by the camera has an embedded copyright notice without any further effort on your part (and in PhotoShop CS+ winds up in the "author" metadata for instance).
The second tip: while you are setting your copyright notice into your camera, take the time to synchronize the camera's internal clock to your computer's clock. When done to all your camera bodies, the image capture timestamp will alllow you to properly sort your take from a session into "as shot" order from multiple camera bodies (including rental ones!). The caveat here is that you generally need to do the clock synchronization every month or so because the clocks of individual cameras drift at different rates and can easily get out of synch.
HTH
Cordially, Michael Beasley