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Enjoying a High-Tech Round of Show-and-Tell
The Post's Leslie Walker introduces Randolph Harrison to a few of the features of her digital camera.
(By Dennis Drenner For The Washington Post)
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Bingo. We were soon taking a 360-degree virtual tour of a house with a garish decor. "Wow, check out that orange paint," Pegoraro quipped. "What's that going to do for the sale value of this place?' "
"I'd have it repainted," Jeanne said, peering over his shoulder.
Next, Pegoraro installed the Firefox browser and showed the couple a few useful Web sites. Among them was Kayak.com, a travel service the Harrisons said might help them book lower fares for a wedding this summer. Next came comparison shopping service PriceGrabber.com, where Pegoraro entered the model of digital camera he had bought his wife and demonstrated how to get price quotes from different retailers.
Randolph perked up during the iTunes display, asking about the limitations that Apple Computer's music service places on copying purchased tunes.
But the demo that intrigued him the most, he later said, was the photo software Picasa. The Harrisons had held off going digital, he explained, until digital camera prices fell to affordable levels.
To show what Picasa could do, I snapped pictures of the Harrisons with my digital Nikon, opened a flap on the camera, pulled out the compact flash storage card holding the images, and slipped it inside a card reader I had plugged into their computer. Picasa instantly found the pictures.
Pegoraro then walked the Harrisons through editing tricks, such as cropping extraneous people -- Beyers and me -- out of the picture. He showed how to straighten crooked perspectives, lighten and darken images and "undo" changes that don't work out.
"What can you do about my hair? I have a 20th college reunion coming up," Jeanne said with a chuckle.
Pegoraro showed how to recolor photos in sepia tones and introduced the "mask" tool that lets people select any area of an image and instantly recolor it.
"So it's like a rinse. I love it!" she declared.
Before we left, the Harrisons thanked us for the show-and-tell, which they said had opened their eyes to unfamiliar resources.
I checked in with Jeanne a few times over the next week and chatted by phone as she sat down at her computer to download the first photos she had taken with the digital Nikon.
"There it is!" She burst into laughter when she saw the photos she had taken of a couple attending a prom in yellow and orange outfits made of duct tape.
She and Randolph were close to buying a digital camera, along with an iPod and DVD player. But she still needed help using much of what we had showed.
"Is there a little guide, 'Things you'd love to know but nobody ever told you about technology?' '' she asked, describing how so many people feel when they try to upgrade their digital lifestyles. "It's like trying to look a word up in the dictionary, but you don't know how to spell it, so how can you look it up?"
