Novice Digital Photography Guide

This is a guide I put together for an Enrichment class my wife taught. It's a little bit dated by now.

Megapixels

Means 1,000 pixels, which are the little dots that make up digital photos. (When you enlarge a photo and it gets blocky, you're seeing the stretched-out pixels.)
More megapixels = sharper photos (better resolution) and more memory requirements for your camera disk and computer hard drive.

1 megapixel - good for sharing photos via e-mail and the web, print up to 4x6 photos, not good for enlargements. ($80+)
2 megapixels - up to 5x7 prints ($100+)
3 megapixels - up to 8x10 prints ($150+)
4 megapixels - up to 11x14 ($200+)
5 megapixels - up to 12x16 ($250+)
6 megapixels - up to 16x20 (muy expensive)

There are actually 4 or 5 competing formats but they're all of similar size. Ours is 32MB and will hold roughly 100 photos (1.3 Megapixel camera)
Keep an extra with you so you never run out of "film"
As you download photos to your computer at home, your disk gets erased so you can use it for a fresh batch of photos -- this covers cost of film and developing fairly quickly.

Digital zoom is worthless -- all it does is crop the photo to a smaller resolution -- you can do the same thing on your computer with the original unzoomed photo.
Optical zoom is worth paying for.

Most software that comes with cameras is crummy.
The key to a good digital photo experience is good photo organization software.
I highly recommend Adobe Photoshop Album (which is now part of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 - purchase or try starter edition first). A friend of mine likes Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album (now owned by Corel). And then there's Google's free Picasa, which I've tried but it didn't really click for me.

A few benefits of Photoshop Album:

Makes photos easy to find despite cryptic file names
Tag photos according to event, subject (each family member gets a tag)
Automatically keeps track of time, date you took photos
Allows you to rotate, fix brightness/contrast, remove red-eye, crop, etc.
Create calendars, web photo albums, slideshows for computer or DVD player, birthday cards, etc.
Automatically shrinks photos before e-mailing (to avoid long download times and recipients opening the e-mail to see only one eyeball on the screen before scrolling around to see the huge photo)
Automatically back up photos to CD when/if your hard drive gets full (or in case of a hard drive crash)

Depends on how often you use the LCD screen, if you zoom in and out a lot, how often your kids ask to see the photo you just took on the LCD screen, etc.
We use rechargable AA batteries that last for about 100 photos before needing a recharge.

Get a multimedia reader - connects to computer (usually via USB) and shows up as another drive. Software will move photos to your hard drive and erase the disk for reuse.
Can also (usually) connect camera directly, although this uses battery power. Some cameras come with a docking station so you set camera in place to download photos.

Take disk into Target, Wal-Mart, etc.
Upload (if you have a speedy connection) to sites like Ofoto, Snapfish, Wal-Mart and have prints mailed to you (or pick up in-store in Wal-Mart's case). Also get mouse pads, calendars, Christmas cards, etc.
Buy a photo printer

The quality of the lens is extremely important. A cheap lens with lots of megapixels isn't as good as a better lens with fewer megapixels.
Your flash only works as far as you can spit
When taking a picture, set up what you think is a good photo and then take a big step forward (most people leave too much around the edges and the subject ends up being too small)
Don't insist on centering the subject (example: my snowdrift photo where I'm centered but you can't tell how high the drift -- mostly road in bottom half of photo)
Memory is cheap -- take more photos than you need and delete the ugly ones later
Mark (tag) favorite photos as you go -- every few months get prints made if you insist on having prints