In reply to ford23:
Nope, you definitely need a dSLR if you want to take nice pictures and really develop your photography skills
Re. photo sites, photobucket, flickr, imageshack etc are all popular photo hosting sites. I use flickr and dump everything publicly, I have friends that use flickr who keep mostly everything 'private' and only share their 'gems' publicly. Either way you do it, you can selectively link your images from any photo hosting site to your blog.