|
|
|
|
||||
© 2001 by Rick Altman. All Rights Reserved.
|
|
 |
8:00am. The wind is swirling and from the looks of our neighborhood, it has rained all night. We’re wimps out here in California—a half-inch of rain overnight is a monsoon as far as we’re concerned. As I survey the wreckage that is our backyard, I see that the sky is not the only place from which it is raining. One of our automatic sprinkler controls has blown its top and is shfitzing all over the side of the house.
“There’s one trip to Home Depot that I’m not looking forward to,” I think to myself, imagining the consequence to my psyche when I walk into the haven for all who are Mr. Know-it-All, with the daunting task of describing my predicament. “I need to replace the little doo-hickie,” I’m liable to say, “that goes atop the thingamabob that turns my sprinklers on and off. And then I need you to tell me how to install the doo-hickie. Better yet, could you just come over to my house later today, say about 11am?”
I might be a loser to the Home Depot set, but I’m also a nerd, and that gives me a leg up on the other losers. So I grab my digital, head outside, snap about 10 shots from all angles and distances, and drive purposefully to Home Depot.
“Here,” I say triumphantly, practically shoving the LCD display of the camera in Mr. Know-it-all’s face. “This top part is leaking and needs to be replaced.
“Oh, you need a new solenoid control, and probably a sensor,” comes the incomprehensible response.
“All I know is that I need one of these. Please help me locate it.”
I go home, fix the doo-hickie, and make a mental note to rent Revenge of the Nerds tonight. I LOVE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!
10:00am. Jody, my trusty office manager, informs me that we still have about a dozen conference T-shirts and tote bags left over and that we should try to sell them. Tossing up an order form on our secure server is the easy part; enticing people to buy the shirts is the hard part. I immediately think of Cary Anne, that babe—um, the attractive young lady who works at the after-school daycare down the street. She says she is willing to model the shirt for me and so I grab the digital and head over to school.
We find a good backdrop, and I use the LCD monitor to position her in the frame. She enjoys acting like a model, I enjoy pretending to be a photographer, and neither one of us is in a hurry. Five minutes later, after all of the framing and pretending, we’re ready to shoot.
Correction. I am, but the camera’s not. Too much framing with the LCD monitor—the batteries are all dead. Aarrgghh! I HATE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!
I race home, all the way praying that I remembered to place my spare set of rechargeable batteries in the charger. I didn’t, so I have to use a fresh set of regular batteries, knowing full well that they’ll be equally dead in about five minutes.
Okay, I exaggerate, but the cold fact remains that digital cameras and their cute little LCD monitors positively eat batteries. I learn through multiple miserable experiences to use the LCD only to survey the photos afterward. I take the pictures the old-fashioned way, by shoving my eye into the doinky little viewfinder.
Once we get going, however, I’m the total stud photographer. Film? What film?? I’m a stud photographer and I’ll snap as many shots as I see fit. Let’s try a few more from the profile...good, now let’s have you hang the bag from the other shoulder...look at me...good, now look away...great, now angle away from me and gaze over your shoulder...
Together we check out the photos, determining which angle and pose are the best, and we shoot a few more that way. By now, there are several kids and a few parents watching, and they think that we’re pros.
Reality check: All I’m trying to do is get one decent 300-pixel wide photo onto my Web site; we’re not trying for Life Magazine here. But that’s the beauty of going digital—it costs me nothing (okay, a bit of battery life, but practically nothing) to take a few more until I get it right. And I know immediately if and when I get it right, not one hour and one round-trip to the drug store later. The photo works, as we sell almost all of our extra totes and shirts (but we still have a few left, so click here to order your own...)
With my digital camera, I tend to take more photos in order to get that one good one. That quite literally makes me a better photographer. I LOVE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!
Noon. I know it’s around here somewhere...I just had it. Maybe the dog ate it...we don’t have a dog...maybe we had a dog, he ate it, then ran away, and that’s why I can’t find it. Maybe I’m losing my mind.
I refer, of course, to the small (at the moment, seemingly microscopic) removable storage card that shuttles between the camera and my computer. It’s missing, and without it, my camera is a useless toy. Now if I were using my conventional camera, I would just head to the kitchen desk and pop in a new roll of film, or worst case, run down the street to the 7/11 and buy some film. But our 7/11 doesn’t yet carry CompactFlash cards. I cuss at my keyboard (why cuss at myself when I can misdirect anger at my computer??) as I URL my way to gadgets.com and order not one, not two, but three extra flash cards. I HATE MY DIGITAL CAMERA!!
|
2:30pm. Our insurance agent calls—this can only be bad. She’s going to jack up our rates unless we can demonstrate to her that our house is safe from burglary threats. The perimeter security, motion sensor, auto-dial 911 system, and the fact that we live in an ultra-safe neighborhood is of no concern to this nazi—um, to this concerned professional. She wants to know if we have deadbolts on our doors.
“Of course we do.”
“We’re going to need to see them, and in the meantime, we can’t offer you coverage”
“But Ms. Nazi, can’t you take my word for it until you verify it?”
“The problem is that many of our customers don’t know what a deadbolt is. It’s not that we don’t trust you, it’s that we can’t be certain that you aren’t looking at the regular doorknob and thinking that it’s a deadbolt.”
I’m not making this up. I’m not sure if we’re in good hands, if they are like a good neighbor, or if we own a piece of their rock. I just know that if I weren’t laughing so hard, I’d be incensed with insult.
“Ms. Nazi, do you have an Internet mail address? You do? Good...and do you know what an attachment is? (Now it’s my turn...) It’s not that I think you’re stupid or anything, but many people see that little envelope icon, and they think they are supposed to go to their front door and wait for a letter to show up.
Okay, so I don’t really say that part; instead, I ask her to watch her inbox, and when a message from me arrives, to double-click the things at the bottom that say frontdoor.jpg and backdoor.jpg. Digital camera to the rescue: Two clicks later (I don’t take multiples of these; who cares if I use good composition for a lousy door?) and I have my oh-so-precious proof of deadboltdom. I decide to leave out the part about how easy it would have been to fire up PHOTO-PAINT and superimpose a deadbolt on a door that doesn’t have one.
I LOVE MY DIGITAL CAMERA...
•
Try as I might to create a clever hook or element of uncertainty for this article, it’s really a no-brainer. A digital camera remains one of the coolest things that anyone who takes photos can purchase. And the surprising part of the story is how low the buy-in is, depending upon your application. If you want to use your digital camera to take photos that look and feel like the prints you get back from the developer, then yes, you will need to invest a few hundred dollars (although you are wise to resist the allure of the new 4-megapixel generation unless you truly need 8 x 10 prints of your masterpieces). But if you just want a camera to email photos to insurance nazis, not feel like a dork at Home Depot, place images on your Web site, or—and this is one of the best reasons of all time—to send pictures from your vacation to all of your envious friends back home, you’d be amazed at how little camera you need. From my daughter Erica’s ninth birthday slumber party comes the photo at right, taken on a Kodak DC50, a camera that was made in 1994, and looks and feels like a thermos. Not to suggest that you go quite to this extreme, but the DC50 sells on eBay today for about $25, and cameras twice as good and twice as new sell for barely $50.
Images destined to stay on screen simply do not need as much fidelity as those heading for print. And images created for a website (typically resampled down for faster downloading) are more forgiving still. The digital camera that I use most often is my two-year-old Kodak DC-280, a 2.0 megapixel model that is supremely easy to use and (perhaps more important) very easy to remember how to use after a month or two of inactivity. eBay wants about $100 for them—solidly in just about anybody’s holiday gift gadget price range. And if my circle of friends are any indication, this is the year that many of them take the digital photography plunge.
Copyright 2001, All rights reserved. Have an opinion? Share it with the Corel community at the CorelWORLD Forum. There is already quite a bit of discussion about this story. Join in.
May 2007: As simple as possible, but not simpler... · April 2007: Killer Keystrokes · March 2007: Resolution Confusion · January 2007: Fearless Forecasts for 2007 · November 2006: Epiphanies at PowerPoint Live 2006 · August 2006: Escaping Death by PowerPoint · July 2006: Notes from the Floor of InfoComm · June 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--Making Movies for Business and Pleasure, Part II · May 2006: Beyond PowerPoint--From Photos to DVDs · April 2006: It’s Your Music!--Overcoming the oppressive restrictions of iTunes · March 2006: CorelDraw X3—A few must-haves and a few missed opportunities, all in all, a credible upgrade · February 2006: Making Windows Inhabitable · January 2006: Fearless Forecasts for 2006 · September 2005: Just What is a Background Anyway? · August 2005: Meet David Dobson, Corel's New CEO · July 2005: Community, Blind Dates. and Albert Einstein: An Interview with the PowerPoint Live Conference Host · June 2005: CorelWorld 2005: Image Editors, Executive Appearances, and Krispy Kremes · May 2005: As Adobe's Shadow Grows, Is Corel Better off or Worse? · March 2005: Delivering Your Presentation: How Close to the Source Can You Get? · February 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation Part II · January 2005: Digital Photography: The Killer App of this Generation · November 2004: A Killer Deal for Corel Or Another Distraction? · September 2004: The Scourge that is Kazaa and AOL Instant Messenger · August 2004: The Golden Triangle: Presenter, Audience, and Slides · July 2004: A Blast from the Past: How Fast is Fast Enough? · June 2004: Guilty Pleasures · May 2004: A Personal Wish List for PowerPoint 12 · April 2004: Eyedropping: Version 12 makes a good tool even better... · March 2004: Deadly Sins Of Modern PowerPoint Usage · February 2004: Is the even-numbered curse finally over? · January 2004: Another take on Achieving Absence of Ugliness · November 2003: What can we do it again??--Debut of PowerPoint Live Leaves Unquenchable Thirst with the Host · September 2003: Corel Corp. Has a New Custodian · July 2003: Candor and Contrition at CorelWORLD · June 2003: What a Long, Great Trip It’s Been! · May 2003: The Boat that Corel is Missing · April 2003: No Fooling...Is Corel Breaking Up? · March 2003: The Annual Design-a-Brochure Contest · February 2003: Symbolism is Everything · January 2003: Mania, Our Semi-Annual Pilgrimage to Holland · October 2002: On Creativity, Problem-Solving, and Paper Bags · July 2002: CorelDRAW 11: Surprise, Surprise... · May 2002: The Sound of Silence: What does it mean when a company plays its cards so close to its chest? · April 2002: The Art and Science of Presentation Graphics--Creating for the Screen Has its own Challenges · March 2002: CorelDRAW 11: What kind of personality and attitude should a software program have today? · February 2002: Oy, my aching fingers... · December 2001: Digital Photography · November 2001: Can we say goodbye to the Rolls Royce Mentality? · October 2001: An Unforgettable Week: The drama that unfolded around CorelWORLD · August-September 2001: The Art of Paragraphics: New-age ingredients for success with Corel VENTURA · July 2001: Your Very Own Interface: How to make Corel applications read your mind · June 2001: Fighting the Font Wars: How to stay sane with your sans · May 2001--Turning the Key at Nicholas-Applegate · April 2001--A Modest Proposal for Reviving VENTURA Publisher
Copyright © 1995–2013 Unleashed Productions, Inc., All Rights Reserved.
