LuckySe7en said:
welcome my fellow canon user! You'll love the camera. My advice would be to shoot A LOT. Take a look at some of the pictures posted here. What I did was look at some sample pictures that other people have taken with my same camera/lens combo for some motivation.
I only have an 8gb sd card.. So I won't shoot a ton,
but I've already gotten a solid hundred photos I really like. The lens is awesome and the picture look as if they're clearer than reality.
Wow, I'd say there is a problem right there
Basically if you've already read the manual, if you set the camera to "M" it will allow you to dial in all those numbers yourself.
Shutter speed you will need to raise when you want to capture a fast moving object without it being blurred in your shot or slow down if you want blur in your photo (like cars and night or running water)
Aperture (f/ whatever) you'll need to change to have either more or less area in focus. Higher aperture (like f/2.8) is to let more light into the lens, it will give shallower depth of field (more blur on your subject and background) and lower aperture (like f/11) will give greater depth of field rendering images sharper with sharper background but letting less light into the lens (so you'll need to drop down shutter speed)
ISO - always shoot 100-400 ISO if you can, letting it go higher increases sensors sensitivity to light but it also increases noise and decreases image quality and dynamic range. When outdoors or in well-lit conditions, use low ISO's for better image quality, but when shooting under low light indoors, you might need to up the ISO. Don't expect awesome results on over ISO 800-1600 though.
Little green arrow on the scale in your viewfinder indicates measured exposure. If it goes to your left from the middle, your image will come out too dark. If it goes to the right, it will come out too bright. You want to keep it in the middle if you can but even that won't guarantee that the shot will be perfect. Sometimes the camera metering system can be wrong and you have to manually adjust it. Most of the time you will probably raise or lower shutter speed to ajust for exposure, but in some cases you might want to keep shutter speed constant and only change aperture or ISO.
Modes like Tv and Av let you only set either shutter speed or aperture, while taking care of the rest. If you want to save yourself time, by understanding what you're shooting, you can use one of those modes and save yourself time. Those 2 are very useful.
Also on your camera use evaluative metering for now, no need to get into spot or center weighted just yet. And I'd suggest using manual AF point selection. The auto AF on those cameras can be wrong a lot of times.
If you don't have special editing software, use GIMP or something and shoot JPEG
If you got Photoshop or Lightroom, shoot RAW, it will give you more margin for error in case you underexpose your image and you need to raise exposure in the software.
I suggest trying different settings and see what they do. Eventually you'll become very familiar with your camera and you'll be quick with it. However, mastering your gear is only a little part of photography. Majority of it is in your head.
My 2 cents.
