use my camera without skype

Hi
wanna ask about my webcam, wanna take pictures with it but don't know how to do it!
I can use it only while using skype and it's work's good!
I have sony vaio, nvidia GEFORCE with CUDA ( I don't know if there's some other details could help ) i've installed as a driver "ricoh-webcam-r5u870-firmware_0.11.6-0arakhne0_i386.deb" when I installed ubuntufor the first time
beginner don't know what to do help me ^^