So what are the basic things you need to know to be able to use your new SLR camera correctly? Here are some great pointers to help you take better pictures and possibly start a photography career down the road.
Shutter
The shutter speed refers to how fast your shutter is opening. The longer it's open, the more light you're letting in. If you have a slower shutter, you can capture motion blur; with a faster shutter, you'll freeze the motion.
Aperture
Aperture, or f-stop refers to how wide the opening of your lens is. The wider it's open, the more light you're letting in. With a wide aperture, you're lens blurs the background; with a small aperture, your background is more in focus.
ISO
ISO refers to how sensitive your sensor is to the light that's coming in. The higher your ISO, the brighter your image. With higher ISO, you'll see more grain or "noise" in an image than you do with lower ISOs.
So you've got to decide which settings you'll be using to make your picture brighter or darker. When you let in more light with one, you have to let in less light with the other to get the same exposure.
Exposure
You've probably heard the term exposure when people talk about photography, but what does it mean? Well, it's referring to how well-lit your picture is. So when we talk about getting a "good" exposure, that really depends on what elements of your picture you want well lit. If you're going for a silhouette, you're looking for a good exposure of the sky, but your subjects are actually underexposed. If you want your subjects' faces brightly lit against a bright sky, you'll have to overexpose the sky so you can get a good exposure on the subjects. So you need to decide which part of your picture to expose before you can figure out which aperture, shutter and ISO to use.
AV-Mode
You will likely see several settings on the dial of your new SLR camera that determine how much control you have over your exposure. With AV-Mode, you'll be able to decide which aperture and ISO you want to use, and your camera will decide the shutter speed for you. This could be used when you don't mind whether your shutter goes fast or slow, and you want to be able to switch between having your background blurred or in focus.
TV-Mode
With TV-Mode, you'll be able to choose the shutter and ISO, but your camera will decide the aperture for you. This can be used when you don't mind whether your background is in focus or not, but you need to be able to switch between freezing the motion or getting motion blur.
Automatic
With your camera on Auto, you won't be able to choose any of the exposure settings because your camera will do it all for you. It does this by taking in light across the entire picture and guessing a proper exposure. This is most likely the mode people will choose when they have no idea how to operate the camera because it takes no effort or knowledge at all. But there's no way for your camera to realize that a bright sky is throwing off the light meter, or that you are trying to capture a silhouette, so automatic rarely gives you the best picture. For the most control over your light settings, it's best to use Manual mode.
Manual Mode
With your camera dial set to Manual mode, you have full control over your shutter, aperture, and ISO, and how bright or dark your picture turns out. You'll also have control over your flash and how bright it is, or whether you want it going off at all.
Focusing
Your lens will likely have an option to autofocus (AF) or manually focus (MF). With autofocus you can use the red focusing dots inside your viewfinder to determine where the lens is focusing. This is an easy way to get your focus perfect without having to adjust it manually. With manual focus, you will be able to adjust the lens to the focusing distance you're looking for without having to use the dots, but it's often difficult to see whether you have a perfect focus inside a small viewfinder.
RAW vs. JPG
Another important feature you'll get to change is the option of shooting in RAW or JPG. When shooting in JPG, your camera compresses all of the information about the picture as soon as it's captured, making adjustments more difficult in post-processing. When you change the quality to RAW, your camera retains all of the information about a picture inside the RAW file, so you'll be able to easily make adjustments to the picture after you've captured it in a program like Adobe Camera RAW or Lightroom. With RAW files you'll be able to maintain a high quality picture even if while making dramatic changes to the image. The only downside is that RAW files are much larger than JPG files, so you'll need a lot more memory both on camera and on the computer to store your images.
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