For a film camera, I used an old Nikon F2 for years. Completely manual everything, so you really get a feel for how to take pictures and what impact changing settings will have on your pictures. My wife had a Nikon FE, which had auto exposure (aperture priority) and took really good pictures. The nice thing about the manual cameras is that there are fewer things to go wrong with them. The Nikon F and F2 were both professional quality cameras which were incredibly well built. I used to think that they were crazy heavy, until I got used to my Canon 50D.
As for a lens - you could do a lot worse than a 50mm prime lens. I got the Canon 1.8 50mm lens, which is dirt cheap. The main advantages:
1. lightweight
2. fast - about 2 f-stops faster than a typical zoom lens
3. cheap
4. decent portrait lens if you have a cropped sensor
5. large f-stop settings mean you can take pictures with a narrow depth of field
As for that last point: "lens speed" refers to how much light can be let in when the lens aperture is wide open. The smaller the number, the more light that is let in. This is great, since you can take pictures with shorter shutter speeds, limiting movement. It allows you to do hand-held photography inside, for instance. However, the more open the lens, the shorter the depth of field. This may be good or bad. In landscape work, you probably want a large depth of field so that both the trees in the foreground and the lake and mountain in the background are in focus. On the other hand, if you are taking a picture of a person in front of a noisy background, you might want to keep the person in focus but blur the rest of the picture. Think of a portrait of a person who likes to read - you may wish to take a picture of the person in front of a book case. If the books are in focus, it would distract and weaken the portrait of the person. However, a short depth of field can allow the person to be sharp while the books are blurred. This will convey the feeling that you want about the person (someone who likes to read) while lessening the distracting impact of the books.
To get a 'fast lens' (i.e. one with a small f-stop number rating), you either need to pay through the nose for a fast zoom lens, or get a much simpler prime lens. A prime lens will not allow you to zoom in on the subject (unless you move closer), but then you can always crop the photo in photoshop or the gimp.
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You don't stay up at night wondering if you'll get an Oleg Saprykin.
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