I'm glad you asked me that. In fact, you might call it a special camera of sorts. What really is the difference between a "consumer" camera like the Nikon D60 and a "professional" camera like the D300?
And here I'm not about insulting your perfectly good consumer camera. Yes, there are some advanced features, but the real difference may surprise you.
Cameras have very little outside surface area, and much of it cannot be used because you have to support it in hands covered with fingers. My oh my. That makes the precious few control surfaces such as the top edge and the backside very valuable real estate.
Choosing what controls would go in those areas was done fairly and rightly. User studies of what ordinary folks and professional photographers do most often, what their pet peeves are and their ambitions are, resulted in the cameras you see.
The D60 like most nice consumer cameras has what we call a PASM dial. It has P.A.S.M. and little icons of a running athlete, a couple of sunlit mountains, a kid's face, and a flower. That gives you full automation or some choices of self control if you need them. Go from P to A or S and you have to remember a complex series of button presses and wheel turnings to select the F stop or shutter speed you want. Which brings up another point...buttons in that crowded little area have a main function and a secondary function when you are holding down a second button at the same time. Think of this as "CAPITAL LETTER" and "little letter". The meaning of the little letter (default) is printed right on the button, but to get the CAPITAL LETTER function you have to hold down a shift key of sorts, just like when you're typing a memo. The little letter functions on the buttons are the ones you use most, so for a consumer camera they will be wrapped around your need for help from the camera.
My D300 is actually EASIER to use...if you are a pro. A pro has to hunt up things that are buried under shift keys and deep in menus on your consumer camera. So for us the pro camera is easier. It acknowedges that we don't just take photographs of what something looks like but we are making a statement by how we adjust depth of field, blur, and white balance. Gone is the PASM dial and in its palce are little letter buttons for ISO, WHITE BAL, and QUAL. Yes, I can set my camera's sensitivity to light, how it ignores colour casts from incandecent and flourescent, and what file size and storage format I want to use. Below that is a dial that gives me the old P.A.S.M. but no cartoon characters running, posing, or looking at mountains. In addition to the dial on the back that I can use to change shutter speeds, there is a dial on the front right where my pointing finger grips it that changes the aperature. Thus I don't have to hold down CAPITAL LETTER functions to determine if one dial on the back does shutter, aperature or flash mode. VERY COOL if you're out there to grab that once in a lifetime journalistic shot and you're too nervous to remember page 449 in the manual that ends up telling you to activate the slip fludgeon in a queep-wise manner (see 329 for fludgeon settings, 294 for queep).
So if the consumer and pro cameras are similar and it's where the controls are that determines the main difference, where does the price come in?
First off they sell a ton of consumer cameras. Cameras capture moments of our lives, everything from our second honeymoon in Oahu to how the neighbour's tree fell and smashed our auto for the insurance company. With so many customers the cost of setting up manufacturing, designing, and even writing the user's manual is divided up among thousands and thousands of people. That's like belonging to a club with 10,000 members that wants to erect a marble and bronze monument on their 100th anniversary. Everyone chips in a small amount. Now imagine you trying to build the same monument to commemorate your bridge club's 5th anniversary. Well the eight people have to really dig deep. It's called the law of supply and demand. They sell fewer D300s than they do D60s and so the price goes way up.
Compound this with a few really nifty things. A vast increase in the number of areas used for automatic exposure, auto-focus and motion detection. A late generation exPeed processor to get rid of ghosting and artifacts, and a viewfinder that actually shows every last dot of the whole image before you press. A built-in flash commander for the multiple flash units that I'm using all the time but most folk never use. And for good reason...you don't want to spend your son's 10th birthday party placing three flashes and asking his young friends to please stop again and look a little more to the left...yes...now hold that pose.
I hope that nails it. As for what you can do if you really want to and you dig into your manual for the four keys you need to set everything manually for that perfect shot, yes, you can make photos like most of mine. But it will be a bit harder to do some of it, and other things will involve expensive add-ons. You'll also have to learn some new skills.
Take the bellows for instance. Nice feature, gives me huge bugs and postage stamps for wallpaper. Your auto-focus does NOT work. With my D300 it cheats and uses special metering to set the shutter speed without any help from the bellows. With a D60 you can use the same bellows, but you'll have to find the proper shutter speed by trial and error. If you want to get by easily and cheaply you can buy those screw-on close-up lenses that fit in the filter mount and take similar shots, though trial and error go into selecting what combinations of diopter ratings you use, and the glass in the lenses tends to cause a bit of chromatic abberation at the edges.
As for ultra-wide-angle or even fisheye, you can spend $40 and get a screw-on wide angle attachment designed to give you ultra wide or even circular fisheye (with an 18mm lens used as the base). It too has problems with chromatic abberation but at least you don't pay $600 and up for one lens.
Finally, flash. Get yourself a flash that is designed to use all the power of your camera body. If you have a hot shoe mount and a nice consumer dSLR or more expensive monobody (one big lens but non-removable), get a flash that can tilt up. You might find a nice $79 job that will give you astonishing results when you bounce the flash off a white ceiling and make your friends wonder why their pictures look like Bambi staring into the headlights of an oncoming car. Tilt it straight ahead and get the long throw. It will reach twice as far as your camera's pop-up flash when you do this. It also doesn't suck its battery power from your camera's main power supply. Niiiice feature.
I will answer questions either PM'd to me or shared in this thread. If I know the answer that is.
Do you use a special camera ? 
