There is no need for a year in a copyright notice. It used to be a USA requirement to include the year of first publication in the copyright notice in order for it to be valid. But many years ago the USA adopted the Berne Convention under which copyright automatically attaches to the creator of the work, whether or not the work is published and whether or not there is a copyright notice. This has been the case in most other countries for even longer.
The date had to be the date of first publication, not the date of creation, so simply using the camera date would not have been sufficient if the photograph was first published in a subsequent year, and the copyright notice would have been invalid.
So there is no legal requirement in Berne Convention countries for a copyright notice at all. However, it can be useful e.g. to deter illegal copying, because the copier cannot argue that he was not aware of the existence of copyright in the image or of the identity of the person claiming copyright.
