What to do? What to do? What to do?

I'm in a bit of a pickle. You see, when I was on vacation in June, on that perfectly blissful sailboat in the delightfully blissful Adriatic Sea, moored in a perfectly and delightfully blissful little cove, I shattered the whole darn scene by tumbling down the stairs into the cabin from the deck, which, since I had my camera in my hand, resulted in a shattered lens. I loved that lens. I couldn't bear to part with it until Friday. Just like Humpty Dumpty, no one could put it back together again, and I had to accept that. The lens was a Nikon 24-85 mm f2.8-4.0, which if you don't know, let me tell you is a workhorse of a lens, a mid-range zoom lens that is ideal for landscape and portraits. Not only that, but the slow aperture allowed me to take low-light photos without considering a flash, thus matching my personal eye and my photographic interests and abilities perfectly. We were a team, that lens and I.

I've had a camera in my hand since I was 16. At least one. And as I got older, I started collecting them as my abilities and also my paycheck grew. Right now, I have two film SLRs, two point-and-shoots and one Digital SLR. I also have a stable of lenses for the film and digital SLRs. For film cameras, I am loyal to the Minolta. I first tested digital with a Canon PowerShot A510 which is a fun little camera with a lot of power packed into its size. With marginal editing skills, I can play with photos from that camera and am pleased with what I have. Thursday's photo is from that little point-and-shoot and Sunday's photo will be as well. But for more serious photos, with good color saturation, white balance, edge clarity, and enough pixels to enlarge, photos that don't need anymore surgery beyond a bit of cropping, you have to get out of the point-and-shoot category. I upgraded last year to the digital SLR, the Nikon D70.

Here's where the dilemma comes in. On Friday, I did the very dangerous action of walking into my favorite photography store, Camera Co Op. They are located three blocks from where I live and I drive by the store at least once a day, each time willing myself to continue driving past. I have thought of asking them to put a cot in the back so I can sleep there at night among all the cameras and lenses, guard them for free just to be in their presence. When I walked in the store Friday, I had in mind to replace my shattered lens. Trouble is, I'd bought it used and they only had new. For $999.00. (I hate that kind of pricing as if it is so much less than $1000.00.) I held the new lens in my hand, touched the cold of its body, and gazed at it lovingly. I think I even dropped a bit of drool on it. And then, just to inflict more pain upon myself, I put it on my camera and looked through it. And that was a sad moment for me. A very sad moment. Seems that when I tumbled down the stairs of the sailboat and destroyed my lens, I also damaged my camera pretty seriously. Serious as in the shutter is stuck. Which renders the camera about as good as a car with no wheels. Oh yeah, I can turn it on but I can go nowhere with it.

And then I looked up. Past the man who was helping me, just behind him to the display of new digital cameras of all sorts and sizes, all snugly wrapped and tucked in their boxes, waiting for someone to take them home and give them life. Each box seemed to be hopeful. Would that someone be me? Not Friday it wasn't. But I had to look and I had to hold and I had to ask a million questions about each one. And I had to ask about the costs. Then they had to pick me up from the floor because not only did I want a thousand dollar - minus four quarters - lens, but after much holding and questioning and comparing and caressing, now wanted a brand new out-of-the box Nikon D2X. And the D2X makes the price of the lens pocket change. The folks at Nikon keep improving on perfection and it's frightening. I love my D70, love it. But this baby, this charming little darling has an improved everything.

Still, for that kind of money, and for all the improvements made, Nikon has not made it perfect. Only Canon has the perfect digital camera. What I mean by that, and you'll have to forgive me here because it's technical which can also be called boring if you're not into cameras, is that the D2Xs has a 1.5x focal length multiplier. As a matter of fact, all digital cameras are off this way (except that Canon, which I'll tell you about in a second). While it can be useful if you shoot with telephoto lenses, which I often but don't always do -- because a 200mm lens ends up with an equivalent field of view of a 300mm lens--it also limits the camera's wide-angle capabilities, because a 16mm lens ends up with an equivalent field of view of a 24mm lens. Got that? Canon's EOS 5D offers full-frame sensors, so essentially what you see is what the camera sees and most importantly, how it processes your shot. But it's a Canon, darn it. I'm a Nikon girl.

And, sadly, I'm rough on things. I don't mean to be. I really try not to be. But the truth is that I am. I've busted two lenses and destroyed four cameras in the past 15 years. That's a lot of money but if I were to own the Nikon2Xs or the Cannon EOS 5D, and so much as scratched it, I'd collapse in tears like a child with a dropped ice cream cone. And I might never get up. Or, I'd never take them anywhere, which doesn't make much sense.

So, out of the store I walked. Empty handed, but with a wallet still in tact and possessing the ability to buy groceries and put gas in my car.

Like much of what is on this site, by working through this issue in words, I've come up with my answer. I'm going to troll ebay for a used Nikon 24-85 mm, and in the meantime get my D70 fixed. Me being me, I'm wonder what I'm going to do with all that money I just saved.