if you are looking for ideas on poses check out
http://www.deviantart.com/ there is a ton of pictures that can help with poses. the artistic nude section has many great poses. i have used it in the past for photo references for art work. another thing you can check out is different artwork by some artist. if you want some thing really erotic look at someone like luis royo. my avatar is one of luis royo paintings. poses can make or break a picture. as far as a camera, anything half way decent. i use a canon powershot S1 ls most the time. it does great pictures, can get very detailed pictures if you want and it does not cost you a fortune to buy one. i have a couple high end pro cameras but a rarely every use them. most the time just grab my little canon because it does the job. read up on the mega pixel thing on the digital camera. it is not always true that the more mega pixels they have the better the picture. the different camera manufactures might have the way their mega pixels are figured out. some the pixels will be bigger and others they will be smaller. i found this out when i got a 10 mega pixel camera for faster shutter speed. took pictures with it and then took it with a canon 3.2 mega pixel i had. the canon blew it away. better picture and better res on it. so read up on that more when checking out new cameras. as far as photo editing software. you can pick up some thing like adobe cs3 extended on ebay pretty cheap and it will have more than enough tools for you to work with. don't go for the most recent version of it unless you want to pay a lot of money. i stick with adobe photoshop cs series because there are a lot of profesional photography addons for it. you can find many packages in photography magazines and stuff for addons. you can pick up your light sets off ebay pretty cheap. i got mine off there really cheap. join sites like wetcanvas.com they have a good community of people. every one from hobbiest to the pros are on there and always willing to help out and give advise. this should give you some things to think over and explore.