allright... all depends of how much money you wanna spend.... a good camera could be the Nikon F65 (very AUTO, but you can go to manual with some limitations), it is pretty cheap and comes with a Nikon optic bundled. My personal choice would be a Nikon F80. Nice camera, good auto mode but you have mo0re control in the manual environment than the F65. The quality of the shots are better than the F65. This camera body can be bundled with a low-cost nikon optic. a 35-70 I think. now... i have to say that the bundled Nikon optics are really lolw-cost. Plastic, no f control and so on... if you whant something cheap buy the bundle, but IMHO you can save you these money and buy something better. Atr the moment SIGMA doing wonderful optics. My 70-200 f2.8 and my 17-35 are sigma and i'm quite pleased... SIGMA does wonderful low cost optics too... you can buy a nice 70-300 f4.5-5.6 for 250. And are a lot better than low-cost nikon f-less ones. more sturdy and good quality. A good flas for you could be the SB-28 from Nikon. the only one i advice... it's costly... (nearly 750) but it's really integrated with the Nikon Camera body and lead to wonderful results. Besides this the Nikon F80 Camera hhas an integrated TTL flas that do a nice job for himself. So don't bother to buy a flash until you are in touch with the integrated one... it is good enough for beginners. Last advice on Tripod. MANFROTTO ones... definitly. Sturdy (i mean REALLY STURDY), nice, very eclectic and modular. Pretty cheap too. The heads are modulars so you could change the head components on the fly... to see some models go to www.manfrotto.it. Don't worry... they ship worldwide. I've bought from Manfrotto all ,my Tripods and head and the statives too... i'm really pleased of the products. For the head my personal advice is the Joystick one... comes really in handy and cost less than 100 .....