Which Came First

I stole the idea for this photo right out of a Freeman Patterson book. He gives his photography students an assignment to shoot an egg. He describes some of the creative ideas they come up with. One is to place the egg on a white sheet of paper to do a "white on white" picture.

It was about 10:00 tonight when I remembered I hadn't taken any pictures, so I had to find something in the house, and I remembered this assignment. I ended up being very frustrated, however, because my camera wouldn't do what I wanted it to. The autofocus couldn't focus on the egg, no matter how hard I tried. I got out the manual to read again how to work the manual focus (something I have never had the patience to try before), and it was completely unsuccessful. Aarrgghh, it was very frustrating. I tried reading over the directions again and again, but they didn't make sense. Then I decided to just try to do exactly what it said without trying to make sense of it, but I couldn't get it to work. I'm a fairly smart person, but I'm not sure if the problem is with me, the camera, or whoever wrote the completely unhelpful manual. This is when I start making Mark nervous by talking about wanting a real SLR! (I currently have a Konica Minolta Dimage 6, which, according to Wikipedia, is a semi-SLR.)