Ben and I were in agreement on wanting to completely escape the madness that was Black Friday, so we grabbed our cameras and hopped in Anderson for a trip north to Sedona.  It was a bright and chilly day, perfect for photography.

I’ve been having some issues lately with my camera.  It seems that no matter what I do, I’m just not getting sharply focused pictures.  Granted, I’ve never expected much from the standard 18-70mm zoom lens that came with the camera, but it has surprised me more often than not with some stunning shots.  Lately however, it’s been failing more than succeeding.  At first I attributed it to the auto-focus being off.  So I started focusing manually.  That worked for a while and I was getting better results than ever before.  Not surprising, considering my old 50mm Pentax film camera didn’t have auto-focus; I was forced to do everything manually.

But even the manual focus was giving me fits on Friday.  No matter how precisely I focused, the resulting photo was blurred.  I tried different exposures, different focal lengths, until I finally gave up just stopped taking pictures.  I mean, why bother?

The strange thing was, the focus issue wasn’t continuous.  I did, in fact, get some great shots before I gave up fighting with the thing:

But for the most part, the day (at least photographically) was a bust.

I did a web search on the particular lens that came with my kit, and the opinion is almost unanimous: it’s a piece of crap, and the focusing problems I’ve been experiencing seem to be universal.

Typical comments from the reviews I found include, “Light weight, not going to cry if dropped,” “I use this lens when I have fears of possibly causing damage to my other lenses,” “Build quality is poor with a generally cheap feel,”  “It gets pretty sharp when the focus is right on but is blurry because the focus is a hit and miss,”  “When the camera is auto-focusing it seems to twitch at certain areas which makes it miss slightly resulting in not so sharp images,” and lastly (echoing my own observations) “You can breathe on the lens when in manual and it will go out of focus.”

I emailed my friend Ann (an astounding photog) about my dilemma, and she wrote back with some very good suggestions, adding, “If you got 18 months out of it [the lens] that’s a pretty good deal.”  The next thing I’ll be trying before replacing the entire kit outright will be borrowing a good 50mm prime lens and see if that cures the problem.  As I wrote to Ann, I really have no issue with the camera body itself so I hope a new, good lens will solve the problem.