A good photographer can get a great image in the camera with minimal editing, keep that in mind. Your original image is overexposed and you should either increase the f-stop to around f-10 because it's outdoors or increase the shutter so it will let less light in. If you don't know how already, learn how to use the histogram to get your photos exposed correctly. A histogram should look like a mountain range if you want details in the shadows and highlights and everything in between. Also look for interesting subject matter. Ask yourself if it's boring or not. Just don't take photos of something for the sake of taking photos and trying to show off your technical skills. If you can catch someone's attention for longer than 5 seconds it's more than likely an interesting shot. If you want interesting shadows, colors, and lighting.. take photos outside around 30 min before sun set and 30 min after. It's called the golden-hours. A larger aperture ie: f-1.4 = shallow depth of field (everything not in focus will be blurry) A smaller aperture ie: f-22 = More depth of field (great for landscape photography) Fast shutter will let less light in but freeze the motion of things like water, vehicles, anything in the wind. Slow shutter will let more light in but any camera shake will make it blurry. So if you had a tripod with your camera on it and a shutter of around 2 seconds and were taking a photo of a seascape, you can have everything but the water focused and sharp but the water will have a dreamy effect. ISO or ASA is the sensitivity of the sensor in your camera. For film, the ISO is how sensitive the film is to light and it will sort of lighten or darken the image depending on the ISO regardless of the other settings like shutter, aperture, etc. So if you had a film of 100 ISO and 400 ISO, the 400 ISO will be brighter even though if you used the same settings to take the picture. So if you set your camera to 800 ISO you can take a properly exposed photo in a dim lit area, but the downfall is that the noise will be more visible. If you want a clear, noiseless image.. set the ISO to 100. Some cameras go down to 50 ISO. If you have a DSLR, set it to take RAW photos as well with JPEG. The RAW file contains a lot of unprocessed informaton and if you take an overexposed image, you can lower the exposure in camera RAW without losing information or very little. The JPEG is for when you're viewing your photos on your computer.