True happiness comes with being comfortable with one's own gear. Once you find the stuff that gives you consistent, pleasing results...you are on the road to nirvana. Some folks are destined to chase the holy grail of gear the rest of their lives and some of us are going to be content to just take good photos.

So that means I arrived a long time ago. I knew the 5D was the Chosen One the day I picked it up and slapped a 24-105 onto it. I just had to go through everything else to verify that it was. Anyway, now that I have gone through everything, I have truly arrived.
I'm still buying a little bit of FD stuff, but that is for play and to try something new, not in search of the holy grail.
I also thought I'd share a lesson I learned recently. I borrowed some MF gear from someone I know and went shooting with Provia 120. A lot of people accuse me of 'spraying and praying' and not spending enough time composing because apparently I don't have my eye glued to the viewfinder and because I shoot digital.
So I took the medium format for a drive and took my time. Spent an entire evening shooting just 15 frames. When the kickass results came back, I looked at the slides on the light table at the pro lab and I was blown away. And the best part? I composed and shot exactly the way I would have with a digital. It's not about the size of your viewfinder. Composition works perfectly fine in your MIND. Composition works perfectly on that 'ground glass' focusing screen called your RETINA in your EYE. As I walk around I'm mentally composing my shot. So all I need to do is bring the camera up to my eye to confirm framing and take the shot. This is a bit of a holdover from my film P&S days and my digital P&S days. I'd turn off the LCD to save battery power which meant I had to compose in this absolutely HORRIBLE optical 'tunnel' viewfinder the size of a drinking straw, so I got good at composing 'off camera' and merely confirming framing before taking the shot.
Wonder how long they will have to go to learn this lesson. You don't compose in your viewfinder. You compose in your mind.
This also largely confirms to me what I thought. Photography is photography, regardless of platform or system. It's all the same. The only things you have to learn on a new platform and system are how to get the technicalities and aspects of exposure control right, which is a 30-minute affair of reading the manual and 'dry firing' for me.
Im with you on that. I love my 20D, it does what i need it to perfectly and even then it still has some features that i like to show off to people with

And that's cool! Congratulations 


you also would want a big fat aluminium (read: heavy, but cheap) Manfrotto to go with it. 

