Screenshots, Screen Captures, and Screen Grabs.

The image above is a screen capture of my computer's desktop, showing the GIMP open in the upper right corner and a photo open for editing in the center of the screen.

When trying to communicate about software techniques, it's often useful to display and share an image of one's own screen. There are a number of programs that support this function, including one or more that may already built into your operating system.

This page has a useful tutorial on basic screen capture functions in Windows.

Gina Trapani's blog has a nice tutorial on captures in Vista with an integrated MS utility (which, unfortunately, is missing from the Vista Basic version).

I've been using Gadwin Systems' popular 'PrintScreen' freeware for years.

Typically screen grabs are captured in .bmp (bitmap) format. I convert them to .jpg in GIMP or Photoshop.

NOT Born to Blog

I was shocked, SHOCKED, to see that I haven't posted anything for 10 months. Between shooting, editing, maintaining 2 websites, a job, and a home, it seems to be hard to execute on the blog mission.

This morning I added a subtitle to the header of this blog; "What I Learned Today". One interesting aspect to digital photography vs. film photography is that there is just so much to learn. The instruction manuals for my Canon DSLR camera bodies have roughly 10 times as many pages as my old manual film cameras, and that's just the tip of the iceberg.

My plan is to start adding content about my own learniing experience on a much more frequent basis. I hope it is of some value to you.