Well, this time there is a real broken lens, not like in my article about photo manipulation. My Sony DSC-P10 Cybershot digital camera somehow got its lens all screwed up. You see, the barrel of thelens extends and retracts upon power on and power off. Without a clue as to how it happened, the barrel became misaligned and now it is stuck with its barrel permanently extended.

I see this as a golden opportunity to purchase a new camera. I’ve been wanting a digital SLR for a long time now. Granted, I’m not a professional photographer and I never will be. However, I have dabbled in amateur photography a small bit and would like to explore it.

I worked briefly at a Target Portrait Studio. Extremely briefly. I was supposed to be hired on for sales and sales only. I didn’t want any part of the photographing. My expertise is getting people to see the value of products that they might otherwise pass over. Making people look good, taking good portraits, setting up the lighting, these are all things that I would not trust myself with. However, I was to go through the training nonetheless.To make a long story short, I ended my employment there very shortly. However, I did get my hands on a Nikon D2X. Boy, it was a beautiful piece of equipment. It was sturdy, it had dedicated LCD displays, the hand grips were meaty. Prior to handling the D2X, I had only experienced prosumer grade cameras. After having the accessibility of a top LCD that told me how many shots I had left, along with a lot of extra information, I found it hard to go back to anything less.
Of course, there is no reason whatsoever for someone like me to own a digital SLR that costs something like $2,000. It’s also rather bulky for me to lug around. Not that I really take a lot of photos as it is. I think that I started to do so less and less after I learned more about photography. I became frustrated with the limited control over how photos came out on my Cybershot. Not only was it very basic, the shutter speed was pretty much garbage.

With that said, I think I’m going to go for one of the most popular digital SLRs, the Canon Digital Rebel series. I have always had my eye on the XTi, but I’m going to be researching the recently released XSi model. As I learned from researching my camcorder, manufacturers may get rid of functions that existed on the old models, functions that I may prefer to have. For example, some models of camcorders from Panasonic were denied their manual focus ring as the model was updated.