ask first what you need or want, then what suits those needs

A photography guide

a) to caretake the environment, think about using less chemicals, thus only using a digital camera, as the film cameras need developing chemicals and print - with a digital you can choose what to print or use it only on the web, saving both money, trees and pollution

b) look at your current job, relations and situation, do you have one or several hours a day free to take up photography, do you intend to make family albums or social shapshotting, are you a nature person or a citydweller, do you have a car or go travelling - then you can evaluate whcih situations you are likely to start using your camera and what you need

c) as well as getting a camera you also would need a place to keep and store your photos, at least one copy backed up so you have the shots you took in two different harddisks, some people use dvds, for storage but that is risky, they tend to self-destoy after some years and a harddisk is much faster and easier to use

d) in any case even using jpg you want to sort and use the pictures somehow - for a beginner i strongly recommend the free Picasa from google to keep track on your photos and learn very very fast basic editing, even for children, and it automatically saves your changes as well as your originals! this program shows all your photos at once, so you know exactly what you have and where, in each folder it creates a folder for originals when you make any changes, and it is incredibly fast

- if you have a mac you can use iphoto which has some more editing features and excellent tagging (always use tags!!!), but with iphoto your changes are kept in the program, so you need to export from it to save actual changes outside the program, this is the case for most photoediting programs - the good thing about iphoto is that you can buy aperture at 200$, and it will import your iphoto changes, so you can work on at a higher level

- on either pc or mac you could also buy lightroom for 300$, here also you need to think about what to import and what not, so i still always keep things sorted by having picasa on the pc or phoenix slides on a mac to get an overview of the photo-collection, because it tends to explode rapidly!

 - with the dp1 comes an easy program for doing simple editing of your raw photos, without detoriating the quality so this is not for jpgs, but you will eventually learn to use an easy workflow by shooting raw, learning to make a fast routine of preparing them and saving jpgs - or save as tiffs for those you want to eidit further in aperture or lightroom

e) with a digital camera you can shoots lots of pictures and thus learn everything by looking at the differences of each setting on the camera, it is really worthwhile to find out what the camera can do and cant do by shooting the same object with different iso, speed, aperture and so on

f) now if you need to make flashfree social snapshots you want a p&s with a zoom and bayer sensor to make high iso pictures (such as a fujifilm f31)

and you want to keep your faces a bit away from the camera to avoid them looking distorted, which is why you normally use 70mm equivalent for portraits - it is actually the distance which is important, the zoom just helps getting the face to fill the frame, so on a dp1 you would need to crop your photos which would mean smaller files

g) if you want to take sports pictures, racing cars, running animals or flying birds you really really want a zoom, lightning fast autofocus and loads of continuous shots, thats the job for a dslr

h) macroshooting of tiny objects is also done with a macrolens and even on certain p&s you can make quite good macros (such as the ricoh r7) the point being that even though you can cut out the tiny part later, you will never get a fullframe ant at the same quality as with a dedicated macro

i) so having outruled these as main reason for using the dp1 we are left with outdoor pictures, long-exposure pictures with a tripod (even a tiny one or a sandbag will do in many situations) and portraits using some external flash, which can then produce righout astounding results, completely useful for posters, printing and selling, look at some of the newer examples on this forum

j) i intend to use dp1 mainly for nature photography, cityscapes and a few portraits of friends and people, and i will shift between jpg and raw depending on the intended use - when the light is boring or i only need to document things (and no not have any other camera) i will use jpg

k) the colours on the dp1 are less satuated with high iso, so if you want to use those it is useful to shoot raw and adjust the colours a bit, or if they are just social photos, use jpg and do the fixing inside picasa, that takes a few seconds only, better still keep a sandbag or pocket-tripod and make a long exposure, assuming its ok that moving objects get blurred out, which is often a beautiful effect

l) get a beginners photography book, the newest you can get, as digital workflow is changing rapidly and you want a book that tells you the basics of photography as well as the basics of using the newest version of iphoto, aperture, lightroom (or other program you might find) - picasa from google does not need a manual if allow yourself to explore it some minutes (supposed to come for osx too:)

m) each program has some ideas about what you can do with your pictures, so evaluating the cost, the environmental impact and the possible benefits (happyness for example) you can decide whether you want to use your photos on the net, emails, book or posters; my motto would be "less is more" to avoid wasting time and money, and its easy and fun to make webalbums plus a good way to showcase pictures fast and free - again picasa webalbums is the easiest (even in iphoto), while flikr is the most wellknown with many more features, do a search on flickr for "dp1" (tags only) to see how!

enjoy and good luck