I am emphatically 100% amateur (if it wasn't immediately obvious). I almost exclusively use small point-and-shoot cameras. I've become attached to a small home-made hiker's tripod. I've gone fully and wholeheartedly digital and have become by imperceptible degrees a power-user of Gimp. Here's my latest thoughts on cameras, film, tripods, scanners, and so on.
Point-and-Shoots: My first two main cameras were film: some old Olympus with no zoom, then a Pentax 170SL with 38mm - 170mm zoom. After a brief time with a hand-me-down digital that had apparently taken one too many falls on El Capitan(!), I bought my first and by far favorite camera: a Casio Exlim (EX-Z850). I used to hold a deep-seated conviction that any of these cameras were perfectly adequate to take great photos -- my technique, not the camera, was the limiting factor, or so the theory went. It turns out I was wrong. Look at the corners of your photos: are they a little distorted? blurred? darker? These problems are often more pronounced at the extremes of your zoom if you have one. My old Pentax was terrible with extreme wide-angle shots, for example. Look at the colors and texture: are they dull? off-color? not crisp?
At what point does one finally give in and start lugging around heavy, bulky, delicate, expensive SLRs?? I'm not sure such dire measures are necessary yet (ask me in a few years when I finally give in and get a D-80 or something!) -- I'm extremely happy with my Casio Exlim (at least when it's not in the shop, but that's another story). I can hardly believe I never noticed how bad my photos used to be! (I'll admit that the majority of my photos are macros of fungi and lichens these days, an area it seems is widely acknowledged that the Exlim excels in.) There are, of course, limitations: It's got terrible noise in anything above ISO100; the aperature is severely limited (f2.8-4.0 for the most part); the 3x zoom is disappointing (on both ends). But the ease and nearly complete control over all the features; the lens quality; the nearly infinite battery life; the size and weight; the white balancing, etc. are all fantastic.
Exposure Control: Whatever you do, make sure you have one of those cameras that you can fix the focus and exposure by half-depressing the trigger. It's pretty minimal, but you can do a lot of really cool things with just this tiny bit of extra control. On any picture with a lot of contrast (like if the sun is in the frame) you're taking a big gamble letting the dumb camera choose exposure settings for you.
Disposables: I used a disposable in Vermont and you can see how lousy the quality is. I think disposables are hit-or-miss: I've seen some really good pictures allegedly taken with them, but my own experience has been disappointing.
Digitals: I've used four: a one mega-pixel Fuji Finepix (1400Zoom), my climber friend's old HP, a Panasonic Lumix, and the Casio Exlim (EX-Z850). I think you really need at least four mega-pixels to get good resolution -- if you do any resizing or cropping, you've got to have the excess resolution or it degrades rapidly, even if you never plan to view a full 2000 x 2000 picture. You really need to be careful about the weird optical effects, like blue/red halos around sharp edges (the Lumix, which is otherwise very high quality, is nearly crippled by this in certain settings). Also pay special attention to aperature and exposure time ranges -- digitals often have much stricter ranges. And even if it claims to allow, say, up to 60 second exposures, don't you believe it until you see it! My Exlim, bless its heart, just gives me more noise for any exposure over 1 or 2 seconds. One last "surprise" for old film-users is the infuriating delay between pressing the button and it taking a picture -- it seems digitals typically are really slow at auto-focusing or something. The Fuji and Lumix are virtually unusable on anything that moves in the least as the result of this. (The Exlim, on the other hand, is fantastic -- it boots up and takes pictures extraordinarily fast.)
Film: I used to prefer Fuji slide film: I've used Sensia, Provia, and Velvia. Velvia is definitely my favorite -- just as crisp and clean as Provia, but the colors are much more faithful, at least to my eye. I always use ASA100, no matter what the occasion: I just love the smoothing effect slow film has on water. And slow film is supposed to be sharper, but I suspect professional-grade slide film will be plenty sharp even at 400 or 800.
Tripods: Alas, they're virtually indispensable. Trust me, if I could convince myself in any way to leave it in the car while climbing or hiking, I would. But if you want a crisp picture, there is no substitute. In a pinch you can usually arrange rocks as a tripod, or even just use a tree or canyon wall or backpack to brace against. You'd be surprised how much even this minimal effort will help. But constantly scrabbling for appropriate rocks is a major pain in the ass. Canyoneer-extraordinaire Michael Kelsey says he modified a trekking pole to use as a tripod. Presumably he just drilled a hole in the top and epoxied in a quarter-twenty machine screw which he can screw his camera into. (Make sure your camera balances well if you do this, though!) Very clever idea, but I hate trekking poles. My main complaint with little bitty hiker tripods (even the two-foot one I made) is that they are just too short. They're just fine for mushrooms and distant scenics, but half the time I see a cool picture while strolling along, when I go to set up the damned tripod I find the picture is all wrong from a vantage point one foot off the ground!
Scanners: Invest in proper scanning technology if you've got slides. Either have the developing place do it, or get a proper slide scanner. Since good slide scanners are bloody expensive you're probably much better off with the former. I've used both the Epson Perfection 1650 flat-bed and the (???) film scanner. The Epson does great on photos, but doesn't focus very crisply on slides. And it does abyssmally on negatives. Negatives require special color-processing depending on the film type: make sure your scanner comes with software that handles this. The cheapo (???) does a little better than the Epson, but still doesn't focus perfectly. I haven't had a chance to try it out on negatives yet. All film scanners are pretty slow, by the way, it seems that's just the way it goes. Nowadays I avoid the problem altogether by just using digital cameras!
Image Processors: Use a good photo editor to manipulate your images, like Photoshop or Gimp. Even just resizing or cropping it, I was blown away by how big of a difference a high quality program makes. Also, there are allegedly correct and incorrect techniques for doing things even as simple as resizing, but I'm still too novice to comment on them. This much I can say, though: it is worth the (significant) effort to learn how to use the damned programs -- they are unbelievably powerful. You can remove dust and even those pesky streaks caused by Utah sand getting inside your camera at the flick of a virtual wrist; you can make your blacks actually black; you can increase the color saturation on low-quality film or old faded photos; you can even partially correct for the dark corners caused by low-quality wide-angle lenses. And you can do a lot of creative not-so-ethically-pure things to correct poor exposure, blurry photos, inconvenient power lines, and obscuring haze, to name just a few! ;)
Color Adjustment: Beware the automatic color adjustment features in scanner and photo editor software: you might get fooled into thinking it's great on your average photo, but sometimes it will screw up spectacularly on dark or monochromatic photos. These days all I do is adjust the bottom end of the "value" range to make the blacks a little deeper. Fuji slide film and my scanners get the colors spot-on, so I never have any need to adjust the red, green, or blue channels separately. (Although I usually increase the color saturation a little, and will often decrease the blue channel just a touch on bright sunny days to improve the white balance.)
JPEG Quality: Good photo editors will let you see the effect of changing the JPEG quality in real-time as you drag the slider around. Some photos require 85% or 90% to come out good, others can get away with as low as 70% and still look fine. It seems that anything with sharp edges next to flat surfaces requires high quality. Blurry pictures and highly textured pictures can generally get away with lower quality. (I apologize for the lousy JPEG quality on my earlier photos -- I was a bit cramped for space!) These days I'm too lazy, and I just go with the 85% which is the Gimp default, boosting it to 90-95% only for thumbnails. (Incidentally, the "ImageMagick" suite of command-line photo manipulation utilities will make quick work of automating creation of thumbnails -- and does I perfectly fine job of it into the bargain.)
Here are a few pictures to illustrate some of my points above: