Welcome to ThePhotoForum, Carmel, and congratulations on your new camera.
We cannot save you from reading your manual, you will have to read it, and maybe read it and test things out at the same time. Since it is a digital camera, you can check up on the results you will have achieved at once.
There are two things important: the size of the "hole" inside your lens (which can be a big hole, letting in a lot of light, or a small hole, letting in only little light). That's the aperture of your lens. And then the time for which this hole is opened up to let in the light. That's the shutter speed. That time can vary between tiniest fractions of a second to many seconds.
If you open up that "hole" for a very, very short time only, not much light is allowed in.
If you open it up for long, there's time and time again for the light to get in.
Therefore you'd only choose very fast shutter speeds (as fast as or even faster than 1/500th of a second) when you have a lot of light for taking your photos (bright sunlight).
And you'd choose long shutter speeds when you photograph in relatively dark surroundings.
You can diminish the shutter speed required for darker situations by opening up your lens for as wide as it can be opened up. That aperture width is expressed by f-stops. The smaller the f-number (f1.8), the wider open your lens. F22 is a tiny hole! Though the number is big.
But be careful: when you work with a wide open lens, that range inside your photo which gets into focus (sharp) is only very narrow. Things in the foreground will be out of focus, and soon behind your focused subject blurriness will start again.
This may be a very desired effect when you want to clearly separate your subject from the background so the subject gets "the focus" (in all meanings of the word), and the background can no longer distract the eye from said subject because it's nothing more but some colourful blurs.
When your focus has to encompass a wide area (landscape photography, for example), you have to choose a smaller aperture. The smaller the aperture, the broader the area that will get into focus.
One thing needs to be watched when you start playing with shutter speeds ... you may very well get another sort of blurriness, even if you focused well in seemingly still bright-enough surroundings: your shutter speed may need to be too long for your to still handhold your camera safely. Which you couldn't in the case of the photo you like best: next to being a very short depth of focus (camera chose to go wide open! and I assume you had it on AUTO), you also have camera shake, which adds a second quality of blur to the one dictated by the wide open aperture. Often it begins to be difficult to hold the camera still at 1/50th of a second already. It sounds like an incredibly short moment in time (which it is!), but for a camera it may be too long already to still be producing sharp pictures. (Though you can teach yourself stability to SOME extent).
Just a couple of thoughts here...
