Diary of a Wolfeman

I’ve recently been thinking about getting a digital camera for taking the occasional snapshot and posting pics of my leatherwork, and today I got assigned to do a site survey of a new client. Actually it’s a two-fold client, as the end-users hired $BigNationalMSP to handle their stuff, but $BNM doesn’t have anyone local – so they hired us at $SmallerLocalMSP to do the legwork in the event a remote session can’t fix things.

Anywho, $BNM has a 20-page survey form, and the last page says “take pictures of everything you can”, so I figured why not? Cameras have been coming down in price lately anyway, so off to the store I go.

What I got was a nice little Samsung S860, which had the two features I really wanted: Digital Image Stabilization (I’ve wobbled almost every picture I ever took with other cameras), and it takes SD memory (because I have a spare 2GB card already). It has some pretty simple controls, and a goodly number of features for taking pictures in various lighting conditions – it can even take movies. Best of all, it’s black :)

Now, the funny bit came when I decided it was time to try offloading some of the test pics I’d snapped around the house. I read the manual, and it was the usual crap for Windoze: load the driver disk, install the software, uninstall any crap I don’t want, etc. On a whim, I took it down to the garage and hooked it up to the new laptop that runs Kubuntu.

A couple seconds went by as it thought about it, and Lo and behold! A window pops up asking if I want to download pictures from the device with DigiKam. <click> and the program launches, scours the camera, and shows me a selection of the pics it found on the camera.

Poking around in the software a bit, I discovered that it has some fairly intuitive image-manipulation routines, so I don’t even have to wade through The Gimp to do a little touch-up and resize. What a relief! (The Gimp is exceedingly powerful, but also very complicated; for my needs it’s like using a bomb-pumped laser cannon to swat a gnat. Sure it looks cool, but I think I missed the target…)

So far, I like ’em both. The camera was just $100, so I should get my money’s worth and then some out of it.

Now I think I need to design a camera case for it. Where’s my pencil…