Lots of good advice and well thought out comments!
My first real lesson in photography was one of the first lessons in the 'Famous photographers school', which had Avedon, Penn and Eisenstaedt as tutors, among others.
They asked you to reproduce a professional photograph with a kodak brownie.
This taught me that what matters is what is in front of the camera, not the camera itself.
If you don't have a harbour, you cannot get that shot of boats reflecting in the water.
And when you do have the harbour and the boats, it isn't the camera that matters, but the way you frame the reflections.
The second lesson is that you have to know what your gear can do. A leica M2 has one stop of speed above a Zorki 4. For most intents and purposes, they can do the same things. If I had to choose between late seventies slrs, I'd be hard pressed to know wether I should choose Nikon, Canon, Olympus, Pentax, Mamiya, Minolta or whatever brand was on the market. They all do the same things, they all have wonderful lenses. The only way to distinguish between them is to be a serious gearhead. (which presumes a series of GAS attacks).
The only way in which the camera matters is in what you want to do with it. For some results, you need at least a 4 by 5 inch field camera. For fast snaps, you need a point and shoot. And there is a wide gamut of options between those two extremes. You can do street work with a Hasselblad, and you can do landscape with a 35 mm rangefinder. But the hasselblad is better at static subjects, and the rangefinder is better at dancing through a crowd. Brand doesn't matter, size does.
Cheers
