Trying to get a screenshot of a digital camera menu

This morning I was trying to update an article for my photo website blog, to illustrate it with some images. First I had to try and find an image that illustrated a point I was making in the article.

When I'd done that, I needed to add metadata to the image so I could upload it to the website.

The first problem was that I wasn't sure if the photo was taken in Leicestershire or Northamptonshire (it was taken in Great Bowden). The image was geo-coded, but on Google Maps and Google Earth, it doesn't show the county boundaries so you can't tell what county the photo was taken in.

So I did some googling and found Historic Counties of England Google Earth Overlay. Using this in Google Earth, I had to highlight the Leciestershire outline, and then I could see the image was taken in Leciestershire.

Next I was writing the description for the image, which was of a family walking through a field. I have seen lots of things promoting walking, so thought of writing in the description that the UK government was promoting walking.

However, when googling the only thing about the UK government and walking was a report from 2001 urging the government to adopt a national strategy on walking.

Doing some more searching I found walkengland.org.uk, which says that a few government departments promote walking. So for my description, I just put that various organisations were promoting walking to tackle the rising level of obesity in the UK.

After getting the metadata for the image sorted, I uploaded it to my website, but there were a few error messages on the upload page.

After lunch I fixed the code in the upload page that was causing the errors, then took a few photos of the bracketing button on my D200.

When I'd done that I wanted to try and get a photo of the camera menu on my 450D where it had the AEB settings. Taking a photo of the menu didn't look very good on the camera that I took the photo with's LCD.

I tried googling to see how to get a capture of a camera's menu, but couldn't find anything relevant - it was all screen capture software or camera remote control software. I had a look on Canon's UK website 450D Press Resources to see if they had images of the menus you could use, but while they had quite a few images, they didn't have any of the settings menus. Also, I didn't know what the license/usage terms for the images were.

I thought that maybe you do it through recording the video out output of the camera.

McRad had a USB video capture device, so I thought I might try and use that. First problem was that the device didn't install automatically, and the driver/software CD wasn't with the device. Looking through Rad's PC CDs I found the driver CD, so installed the drivers, but they were quite different to what it said in the leaflet that came with the device, and actually said they were TV capture drivers.

After installing the drivers from the CD, I plugged the device in and Windows installed it automatically. Unfortunately the cable that I had to connect the camera to the capture device was one of those RCA types with metal 'caps' around the jack, so it wouldn't plug into the camera properly. I wasn't sure how to actually see/record video using the capture device either.

I look through Rad's cables and my own cables to see if there were any suitable cables, but there weren't. They were all either Stereo or Mono cables, or had the 'cap' bits on them so they wouldn't plug into the camera properly.

So eventually I went and got the camera box out of the garage, and got the cable that came with the camera. I had now put the camera battery on charge though, as it was getting low, so I couldn't actually test it until the battery had finished recharging.

I checked the web squeeze, and then looked for some more images to illustrate my photo website blog post. After finding a suitable image, I had to save thumbnails of the different versions of it, and then add metadata to the main version of it.

For the description of the image, I wondered what percentage of the UK was farmland. Unfortunately google's results just seemed to be about farmland prices increasing or decreasing in percentage terms. Eventually I found an article: DEFRA doesn't know area of England's farmland that gave the total land area of England and the total farmland area of England, so I could work out the percentage of England that was farmland from that.

I also went on this blog and found that it was still locked, but it didn't say my review request for it to be unlocked was being processed any more. So I submitted another review request, and also posted to the blogger help forum.

My 450D battery had recharged, so I tried recording the 450D's video output on my PC using McRad's USB video capture device. The program I tried to use was 'AMCAP', a 'DirectShow Video Capture Sample' according to the 'About' dialog of the program. Unfortunately, it didn't seem to work, and just recorded a black screen.

I tried the camera with both PAL and NTSC modes, but still got the same result - a black recording.

I tried the camera and lead out on Moccle's TV to make sure it wasn't a problem with the camera, and the picture displayed very nicely on Moccle's TV.

When McRad came home I asked him how to use the video capture device, and he said he thought you could use Windows Movie Maker to record from it. I had a look on my PC, but it seems I must have uninstalled Windows Movie Maker.

McRad put his PC on, and tried a few programs on his PC to try and capture from a TV card he already had installed that accepted an RCA type jack as an input. Eventually he found one that showed the video output from the camera and also had a screenshot function to take a screenshot from the camera.

Unfortunately the quality of the screenshot is pretty rubbish compared to how the output looked on Moccle's TV. On the TV the image was clean, clear and crisp, but on the screenshot using Rad's PC it looked noisy, compressed, and soft. Still, when scaled down to 400px I think it looks quite good, and certainly better than taking a photo of the camera's LCD looked.

In the evening I checked my email, updated my photo website blog post a bit more, and tried re-processing one of my images I wanted to use in the blog post, though it didn't really come out much differt to how I'd processed it before.

The weather today was overcast all day and rained most of the day. There was a bit of a sunset - the sun dropped below a large cloud slightly, before being hidden behind another cloud below. It didn't seem to light up up the clouds at all except for a bit of silver/orange lining.

Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; mug of honey & lemon drink.
Lunch: Ham sandwich; 2x Pancakes with lemon juice and sugar; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Piece of Chicken & Ham pie; Swede; Potato; Peas; Ground black pepper. Pudding was spotted dick with custard.