What is your goal? If you are just doing it for yourself, then choose the service you find easiest, cheapest, most amenable to your tastes. If you have later pretension of a commercial form, then select something that gives you total control over your content and site services (e.g. advertising, design, expansion etc). There's nothing to say you can't start small and grow, but if you think ahead a little now, it could save a fair amount of headache later. I have to say if I was starting now, I would go with a self-hosted Wordpress option. You can pick up a web host for pennies now (e.g. stablehost.com) and install WP in seconds, select a theme and you're done. The advantage of using WP self-host over WP.com? You get total control from the beginning over things like ads, plugins and themes. The downsides? You have to make sure it's secure and fast enough etc etc. Hope that helps.
I use Wordpress (I don't have an option; my blog was set up for me through the journal) but I would caution others that it has known security flaws and can be cumbersome to navigate around. I certainly don't have the capabilities to use it to its full potential. I've had trouble trying to get images to imbed in posts, whether through my ignorance or the cumbersome nature of the platform.
WP does definitely have some foibles, as with everything, but once you get the hang of it, it's not that bad. Re embedding images, you should be able to do that fairly easily using the media uploader. Just point your cursor where you want the image to land, then click on the Add Media button at the top left of the editing box, select or upload your choice of image and click Insert Into Post. Does that not work for you?