Lessons of youth

@ghdprentice - interesting - my best photos were taken with my old Nikon F from the 60's, but they would have been the same pictures if I'd been using a Canon, Minolta, Pentax, Olympus, etc etc. with the same focal length lens at the same settings. The magic happens in the viewfinder, and every camera's got one...  And the darkroom work and/or an image processor of your choice, of course.

Mission accomplished !

@larsman

I have a Nikon F sitting behind me on a book shelf with a couple lenses. I remember dreaming as a kid of some day owning a Nikon F series. It was of great pride when I could… then the best of the digital series and a dozen of their best lenses. It has been a very enjoyable ride… like putting together my audio system over a period of fifty years.

@mapman 

I just couldn’t resist.

When all was said and done (after getting sucked into all of the equipment hyperbole) what I came to realize was that using a manual camera (without auto focus, spot light meter, auto film advance, etc) and a good hand held light meter made a better photographer of me. It forced me to think much more about what I was doing. Auto focus and built in light meters were/are IMHO the death of creative photography. It took the acquisition of an F4 to reveal this to me. :-)

I see a correlation with this discovery and audio (and I learned this the hard way too). Modest equipment, properly used, can produce excellent results if one takes the time to learn how to use it, as opposed to trying to improve the experience by fantasy based  'upgrading'.