What Was The Camera Thinking?

Remember when I said I was out of beach pictures? Funny story there, apparently I have more. The one above is similar to a couple of others ones I already posted I think, but it's the one below that I wanted to focus on.


And I know you're probably thinking "What's the big deal, he just went into photoshop or something and added some fancy effects or something to the shot below." I can see how you would think that, but here's the thing. That's the way the camera captured the picture. It was like that when I pulled it off the memory card. I have no idea what happened, but the white metering must have just gone nuts or something briefly. My camera has been sluggish sometimes lately. I noticed it more when I was at the beach than now. But every so often I can see I take a set of pictures and the contrast or something just doesn't come out like I would expect it to. This was obviously a different situation since only one picture out of an entire day of shooting was affected, but that's the worst I've ever seen my camera butcher a photo. I can't even conceive of how it decided to go with that (maybe there was an issue and the whole green color spectrum got dropped or something, that's about the only thing that I can think of). So in summary, I think I need a new camera. But I don't think I can afford to buy a new camera now, so I'm going to just have to suffer through with the D70 for a little while longer. And I'll go ahead and add that while I would like to have my camera upgraded, I don't think I *need* to have it upgraded (unless it keeps taking pictures like the one above and then I'll end up taking it out back and putting it out of it's misery). For now, the D70 does just about everything I would want (plus I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of it now). Below I've included the photo I took immediately after the one above for comparison purposes.