Yeah, manfrotto is the only option for tripods. There are no substitutes. May be a bit expensive, but it'll last longer than the love for my girlfriend =) My tripod head is one with 3 seperate handles (left-right, back-forth and turn-around) and it has a angle 'scale' in steps of 10 degrees. One thing I don't like about my tripod is the 'loose' legs, cause they snap back so quickly and hard that I've hurt my finger a couple of times. :) Sigma's indeed great, but if you're looking for good quality, good for EX lenses only. But nothing's wrong with sigma, like Artax pointed out. Good point about using Nikon btw ;) One last thing that might be usefull to know is to buy PRIME lenses only, if your budget allows it. Nikkor primes are very well coated fixed length lenses, so no zoom lenses. Zooms may seem usefull, but they're not. There's a tale that with for instance a 50-200mm zoom lens you wouldn't need your 50, 80, 135, 180, 200mm lenses anymore & just use one lens. This is not true, while you'll hear it in a lot of photo stores. To me personally, my list of things that are most important should look something like this: 1. prime lens 2. choice of film 3. body's brand 4. body's type. Just like Artax wrote, go for Nikon or Sigma first, then decide on which body to use, etc.