By now it should be apparent that I don't update this journal very often. Sometimes I can't think of anything worth saying here that I don't say on my other journals, so I don't.

In the past two weeks I've had a change in my photographic career. Sadly I'm not going professional or anything, but I've been forced to upgrade my camera due to a sad accident.

When I was in Guatemala on a missions trip with my church, I used my Canon S2 just about every day. I documented our flight there and all of the steps of our construction of a 10' x 14' house for a local family. I took pictures of the Vacation Bible School we ran there and of our adventures around the town. The last day I took pictures of our trip to Antigua, a larger town near where we were working. About 5:00, the zoom barrel on my S2 started getting stuck in the extended position. After turning the camera on and off a few times, it would often fix itself, and I would continue taking pictures. Around 5:30, however, it was permanently stuck. Try as I might, I couldn't get it to retract, and thus I could no longer take pictures with it.

When I returned to the States, I had it looked at at a camera shop, and they said it could be fixed for about half of the price of a new camera. This made me sad, as I'd had my S2 for about 2 years and taken over 10,000 pictures with it.

I went for a week without a camera before finally breaking down and buying a new one. I really liked the controls and pictures I could take with the S2, but I also really wanted to upgrade to a full DSLR rather than a point and shoot. I looked at all the options available (Nikons, Canons, and Sonys), but none of them just felt right in my hands. As I posted my pictures from Guatemala, I realized that though I could get better pictures from a DSLR, the ones I was getting from my S2 were sufficient.

I ended up buying the Canon S5 IS, the successor to the successor to the S2. It's not that different from the S2, other than it can shoot 8 MP pictures instead of 5 MP, and it has a hot seat on the top for an external flash. I tried using an external flash with it, and the flash was both bigger and heavier than the camera itself. I probably won't use it very much.

I guess that's it for now. I'm still in the market for a DSLR to use for artistic shots and potentially senior pictures/portraits. I'm not exactly sure which one I'll get, but the Nikon D80 and D200 are pretty high up on the list. I'll keep looking and hopefully get one at the end of the year.