Photographers Like Light

...And Daylight Saving (not "savings") Time begins only one more month from now, on March 11th! Yay, I say.

Early risers might not like that, but only a quarter of us, roughly, are "larks" who are early to bed and early to rise. For those of us who sleep a little later, additional daylight later in the day is a plus without an offsetting disadvantage.

Sunset is already an hour later than it was at its earliest on and around December 8th of last year. The dark days of Winter are lifting in the Northern hemisphere. Spring, although far from here, is coming.

I like this time of year. It feels...hopeful, somehow.

Mike

P.S. Wikipedia relates the preposterous fact that DST was first proposed by a single fellow, an entomologist from New Zealand who wanted more daylight hours in the evenings to collect insects. Its first major proponent in England wanted more light in the evening to play golf. I'm not making that up. The reason for its adoption in the U.S. is more pedestrian and practical...it saves energy (or at least it did then), and, although it certainly existed earlier, it got firmly established here in the 1970s following the energy crisis of that decade.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

B&H Photo • Amazon US • Amazon UK
Amazon Germany • Amazon Canada • Adorama

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

David B: "And then there is Arizona which stays on Mountain Standard Time (MST) year round—except for the Navajo Nation which uses MST and MDT. The downside of year-round MST in Arizona is that sunrise occurs around 5:15 a.m. in the summer. The blue and golden hour come much too early in the morning! Evenings are okay...."

Bill Tyler: "Speed's comment about the complexities of time for computers is well taken. Here's a link to just a little of the tech info. As one example of the evils of DST, consider the poor innocent who tries to compute the duration of some task. He/she reads the clock at the beginning and end of the task, and subtracts the two times, right? Well, what if DST transitioned in the middle. The task might have taken an hour less than the computation, or the computed value might even be negative! There are numerous examples in the computer literature of serious errors that came about because of flawed assumptions about time.

"Not DST related, but time related, is the rare occurrence that happened in the year 2000. Years divisible by four are leap years, except if they fall on a century year such as 1900, except if they fall on a century year divisible by 400 such as 2000. So we had a leap year not for the usual reason, but for a reason two steps removed from the usual one. And then there are leap seconds...."

Phil: "In 1954 I was in the Army in Indianapolis. The Met was performing at the University of Indiana in Bloomington, so a friend and I decided to drive down for the 8 p.m. performance. When we got there, we found we were two hours early, because Bloomington was CDT...one hour for different zone and one hour because we were on DST and Bloomington was on standard time. It was a four-hour opera, so we didn't start home until about 2 a.m. our time, with a two hour drive ahead of us."

Patrick Dodds: "Can. Worms. Opened."

Clayton: "Someone said that DST helped them discover a way to avoid cold feet while sleeping. They cut a bit off the top of the blanket and sewed it onto the bottom."

Comments

[Speed]

Mike wrote, " ... it got established here in the 1970s following the energy crisis of that decade.

Daylight Savings Time in the US is a complicated and entertaining story. However, Wikipedia tells us The U.S. federal Uniform Time Act became law on April 13, 1966 and it mandated that DST begin nationwide on the last Sunday in April and end on the last Sunday in October, effective in 1967.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_time_in_the_United_States#Daylight_Saving_Time_1945_to_1966

Like many stories that involve government, it is complicated, annoying, controversial and a little silly.

[Speed]

While we humans have difficulty keeping the various arcane rules of time straight, imagine how the creators of computers that are born in one time zone, work in one or more time zones and live for years in a sometimes capricious regulatory environment.

Microsoft a Daylight Savings Time and Time Zone Blog.
This is the blog maintained by staff at Microsoft to provide general information, announcements and provide answers to Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) related to daylight saving time (DST) and time zone (TZ) changes around the world
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dst2007/2017/

Then there is the forever evolving time map in the US state of Indiana.

The U.S. state of Indiana is split between Eastern and Central time zones. The official dividing line has moved progressively west from its original location on the Indiana–Ohio border, to a position dividing Indiana down the middle, and finally to its current location along much of the Indiana–Illinois border. Being on the western frontier of the Eastern time zone resulted in opposition from many in the state to observing daylight saving time for decades. The 2005 decision by the Indiana General Assembly to implement daylight saving time remains controversial.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_in_Indiana

And finally there is the modern traveler's question when getting off an airplane: Is my fancy high-tech watch showing the time here or the time where I used to be?

[Sara J]

Save energy? Studies say no.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-daylight-saving-times-save-energy/

"In 2006 Indiana instituted daylight saving statewide for the first time. (Before then, daylight time confusingly was in effect in just a handful of Indiana’s counties.) Examining electricity usage and billing since the statewide change, Kotchen and his colleague Laura Grant unexpectedly found that daylight time led to a 1 percent overall rise in residential electricity use, costing the state an extra $9 million. Although daylight time reduces demand for household lighting, the researchers suggest that it increased demand for cooling on summer evenings and heating in early spring and late fall mornings."

Big uproar in Indiana when it was changed.... the late night TV news people were upset that they now went on the air at 11:00pm!

[Richard Nugent]

Mike, I was always under the impression that DST was first implemented during WW I to enhance war-related production? Also, wasn't DST in effect in the US well before the 1970s? I remember being inconvenienced by the clock change in the 60s and maybe before that....

Cheers

[BruceK]

And DST is despised by (at least) amateur astronomers everywhere...

[Markus]

"...it saves energy". Only that it does not save so much energy. Scientific American finds pro's and cons, the National Bureau of Economic research shows a total increase in the electricity bills for Indiana alone of US$ 9 million, plus estimated "social costs of increased pollution emissions that range from $1.7 to $5.5 million per year"... (Which of course might irrelevant in times of "alternative facts")

My guess is that DST incites economically relevant activities, therefore it will not be abolished. But it makes no sense to switch the clock twice a year - logically you could just schedule all activities for one hour earlier to bring in the desired effects.

[MikeR]

Perhaps an apocryphal anecdote, but I recall that when DST was extended in 2007 into November, one of the lobbying groups promoting the change was candy manufacturers, arguing that the hour extra of daylight on Halloween encouraged trick-or-treaters, and stimulated candy sales. Shopping malls also joined in the push.

[Chuck Albertson]

I wasn't around for WW2 ("It's 12:00, Pacific War Time"), but I remember when DST was re-instituted in 1968. I lived in Arizona at the time, where it was deeply unpopular. With the blazing summers there, the last thing anyone wanted was another hour of daylight. (It was also a requirement of federal law, and therefore viewed as a pilot fish for World Communism by a significant share of the electorate.) The state has opted out of DST ever since.

[Fred Haynes]

A nice treat, a Sunday post! Unexpected. But I'm glad you did.
Something more to read, though I do have the Sunday Times, and Hillary's book, and something by Caleb Carr. It's raining here on Long Island, and I agree that things feel more 'optimistic' with the lengthning days.
I probably said as much before in another comment, but after living and photographing for some time without any image stabilization, I'm thrilled to have what I do have in my aging EM5, and if the technology stopped with this one camera, I'd be perfectly happy!
Between waiting for grand children, and increases in digital camera technology, it's good reasons to 'hang around'.

[Michael]

Ah, there’s always more to history.
https://www.timeanddate.com/time/dst/history.html

[Dave Sailer]

Wake up and die: "Daylight savings is linked to injuries and heart attacks, is it time to scrap it?"

At
https://phys.org/news/2015-10-daylight-linked-injuries-heart-scrap.html

DST is also the largest observational study in human history (1.5 billion people, all involuntary).

[Tsukasa]

Only a quarter of us are larks but they're the ones who set business hours and the rest of us have to suffer for it!

[Bill]

DST was on again off again during both world wars but wasn't official everywhere until 1966 I think

[Tom Burke]

I was surprised to read that your DST starts as early as you say, Mike, but you’re quite right. Across the EU, however, DST starts on the last Sunday in March, which will be the 25th this year.

I understand that there are those who object to it in the U.K., but I’m not aware of any significant opposition. I have to say, I love the long light evenings in summer where I live - on days with good weather, the light can linger until gone 11pm. And the mornings! In June and July the dawn chorus can wake us up before 5am as it is; without DST it would be before 4am.

(I live at about 53°N, in Yorkshire, which is way north of Keuka and indeed north of anywhere in the lower 48 states.)

[Mike in Colorado]

Mike!! I'm under the impression that you set your own hours. If you want to get up an hour earlier starting tomorrow you can do it.

I was a math major, so I'm aware that (-1) + 1 = 0, the exact quantity of daylight that is saved by changing the clock.

Now, if I could save some of that June daylight and spend it in December...

[Richard Jones]

"Spring, although far from here, is coming."

Spring has arrived in Southern California. All California Native Plants, today in my neighbor's garden:

Not that we are all that happy: rainfall has been very sparse this winter, along with a less than ideal snow pack in the high sierras. Not exactly drought preventative measures...

Richard

[D. Hufford]

Ah Wikipedia. I vaguely remember some sort of manipulation of Daylights Savings time in the 70s, because my dad was talking about it, saying he wished they'd stay on it all the time. But in my (very vague) memory of that period, DST was already in use and the government had just extended it to save energy.

So I checked and confirmed that it had been in use (off and on and inconsistently) in the US, since WWI with several attempts such as the Uniform Time of 1966 to make the use, well, more uniform. http://time.com/4549397/daylight-saving-time-history-politics/

I personally hate changing time twice a year and am happy that it is not used in Japan. It has been proposed here, but people object as they fear companies would just use it as an excuse to make people work even longer. And I am sure that they would.

[toto]

"For those of us who sleep a little later, additional daylight later in the day is a plus without an offsetting disadvantage."

Really? What about the fact that one has to get up an hour earlier? Of course it may not be such a big deal for those who set their own work hours, like bloggers (wink, wink).

DST is probably the worst folly foisted on much of the world's population.

[Daniel]

Sunset around 10pm and not really dark until half an hour after midnight in North Dakota. Then starts getting light again around 3:45.

Makes it hard to get kids to sleep when they still have almost two hours of usable light for playtime.

Somehow the livestock still seem to expect feed at the same time schedule. Then again, they don't wear wristwatches.

[george andros]

Mike R. is on to something about the apocrypha of who supported extending DST earlier in to the spring and later in the fall. I remember hearing on NPR that the principal groups that lobbied the Congress in favor of the idea sold charcoal briquettes and lighter fluid. The rationale was that more evening light meant more barbecues.

When I lived in New England we referred to January, February and March as "the dark ages". That was pre-global warming. Maybe it has changed over the last 50 years.

George

[Thomas Paul McCann]

This is regularly debated in the U.K. when we get the usual nonsense about it being safer for Scottish children going to school. Streuth.

There was an experiment some years back when it was cancelled for one year. I much preferred the longer afternoons that gave.

[jbeal]

and then there's the BST (baseball saving time). Cincinnati Reds were traditionally the first game played of the year. but in 1988, the league set the BoSox home opener to start an hour ahead of the Reds game. since the league sets the start to local time, the city of Cincinnati's remedy was to enact BST for the day.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1988/04/04/Baseball-Central/4018576129600/

[Mike Plews]

A few years back Mrs Plews retired from a local high end jewelry store. In the watch case they had a Patek Phillipe mechanical watch with 23 complications one of which was that it knew when it was leap year and adjusted for same. I do not believe it did DST. Perhaps they don’t have DST in Switzerland.
It’s crass to talk money in this context but ten Leica S outfits would about do it.
I’m a Tissot guy myself.
Also liked Daniels comment. I am from North Dakota and I miss the long summer evenings out in the back yard watching the BBQ coals die out.

[nextSibling]

More on the difficulties time causes programmers... https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

[And he didn't even get to Indiana. --Mike]

[Mark Roberts]

The EU is going to review Daylight Savings Time to decide if they want to end it (hope they do, because that be the necessary push to getting it abolished here). https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/daylight-saving-time-isnt-worth-it-european-parliament-ministers-say/

[Dave New]

Most confusing to me was on a photography workshop in/near Navajoland in Arizona.

Depending on which cell tower your phone hooks to, it shows either MST or MDT (and doesn't tell you which you are viewing). To top it off, I was there the weekend of the Fall time change.

I ended up missing a sunrise shoot at Horseshoe Bend the morning of the time change. I was sure that I had set my fancy atomic watch correctly, so I would have the correct time the next morning, but operator error intervened. Sigh.