Probably the easiest thing to write about, since it's more technical than technique, if you take my meaning, is equipment.
I shoot with the following:
I have the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 DX AF-S kit lens that comes with the D40, but I hardly ever use it, and it's not in my bag. It's also not the better VR version.
I'm generally pretty terrible at composing images, and I find with zooms that I think more about framing than I do the actual picture content. Primes have helped me a great deal: I have to frame by moving or reconsider the angle of attack.
I owned the quite nice 18-200mm AF-S—a beautiful lens with great color, contrast, and other picture-taking goodness—but I rarely used it. So I traded it for some money and the 55-200 for those rare occasions when I use a zoom.
You may notice that most of the lenses are manual on the D40; the 50mm AF-D has a screw for focusing rather than the new Silent Wave Motor of the AF-S lenses, so it won't auto-focus on the D40 (or many of its replacements, like the D60, D3000, D5000, and new D3100). It took me a little while to get used to manual focus, but in many respects I've found it more convenient. There's no focus hunting, for example, and that makes it easy to tape out at infinity (e.g., in the car or at night). Primes also tend to be better built (my 24mm AIS is heavier than the D40, I think—it's solid metal construction) and have considerably less distortion.
While the D40 is a 6MP camera, most newer models won't have a problem taking relatively high-resolution crops from images where using a zoom to frame is the only way you'd get a good shot. There have been some occasions where a crop is the only way to get a good frame of a photo for printing.
I expect to upgrade my camera in the near future. The D40 still uses first-generation image processing techniques, and sensor technologies have improved quite a bit since 2006. This means that newer cameras should have better high-ISO / low-light performance; this, along with vibration reduction in the lenses tends to obviate the need for ultra-fast lenses.
I expect I'll either grab a D90 or its replacement (slated for announcement in September, I think). I'd like to have an AF screw, and high-quality video would be nice for martial arts work, too, but I doubt I'll turn into a videographer anytime soon.
With respect to software, I'm mainly an open source guy. I don't have a lot of money to spend on programs, and I don't make money as a photographer (if I did, I might buy a D700 and some pro glass). Most of my photo editing is done in the Gimp and occasionally UFRAW when I shoot RAW (almost never).
There is no good open source software that has an acceptable photography workflow. That's a rant for another day, but for now I'm using f-spot. It could be vastly improved with a genuine calendar interface and album display, as well as intuitive and convenient controls for rating items. This would help the photo sorting process, at least, although it wouldn't address batch image processing, for which you need some kind of interface to ImageMagick, and as far as I know, nobody has really put a good one together.
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