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I by no means am an expert, all of what I know is self taught or learned on the web. I'm still learning and there are many things I'm sure I don't know. But as I have had many, many people ask me how to take better photos I give you this.

The first thing to know is Shutter Speed. This comes in a fractional number on your camera usually looking some thing like 1/200, meaning 1, 200th of second. That's how fast your camera will take a photo. The faster your Shutter Speed, the faster your camera take's a photo and the less light it lets in, the slower the Shutter Speed more light gets let in. How ever the down side low shutter speed is you can get a blurry photo, unless you have the hands of a surgeon or a tri-pod you probably shouldn't shoot at less than 1/30th unless you really have to. Higher Shutter speeds such as 1/250th and above is good for action shots. For animals and people on foot around 1/250 is great. For fast moving things (cars, motorcycles, ect.) I would probably shoot at around 1/700 but you should try a few speeds on what ever your taking a photo of and see what gives you a better photo.

So easy to remember High Shutter Speed=Darker photo, Low Shutter Speed=Brighter photo.
 

The next thing to tinker with is Aperture. Aperture shown in a similar way as Shutter Speed but they are not the same. Aperture settings are known as F Stops. Meaning Fractional Stop, shown like this f/1.0
Aperture is how much light the lens lets through to the sensor or film. Its a bladed diaphragm that looks like this:



The biggest thing to know about Aperture is a lower number means MORE light gets through to the camera. Yeah you would think that less=less but in the aperture world less=more.
Most point and shoots have an aperture of f/3.5-f/7.

The next biggest thing about aperture is that the higher the F-Stop, and thus the less light you let in, the sharper the image. Meaning less things in your photo will look blurry. Very rarely should you shoot at an F-Stop more than 8 or 9 and even then that's for extremely bright scenes or studio conditions.



The third thing to know about is your ISO. ISO is the sensitivity setting of the sensor on your camera. ISO in the most basic terms is how bright or dark your exposure on your sensor is. The thing to know about ISO is the higher the ISO the brighter the photo. But the higher the ISO the more Noise you get. Noise makes the image look grainy and usually very crappy.

 Most cameras have ISO settings that start at 100 and can range all the way up to 6400 (and beyond). Now ISO 100-400 will produce a darker but more crisp image. While ISO 500-6400 will produce a much brighter, but grainier image.

In bright direct sun ISO 100-400 will be fine depending on what you are shooting. Indoors stick it at ISO 800 and adjust from there.

ISO is the one thing you will have to play with the most to grasp how it works. You should play with it a lot in different  lighting conditions.


Side note: White Balance. Most people can get away with putting this at auto and leaving it there. But the more advanced will want to change this manually. The settings in your camera should be pretty straight forward, “Cloudy, Sun, Florescent light,ect.


Now this list is in order of settings I change first to last. I start with Shutter speed based on what I'm shooting. Then I move to aperture based on lighting and lastly I change my ISO to suit the first two.



If there is any thing in here that you feel is incorrect please feel free to let me know. I typed this all up in about an hour at 1am so there might be problems.

I find white balance settings are useful when shooting indoors. Sometimes you can run into a condition where you can have multiple light sources that have different color temperatures; the best thing to do to get proper white balance is to try incandescent and all fluorescent settings on the white balance presets. This also brings up how important it is to know the area your shooting in so you can have the camera calibrated properly, that is only if you don't have time to adjust settings.