Scott,
Got a used 40d i will sell you for $600.
If you want a super sweet, light weight DSLR camera I would look into the Rebel tli - It shoots HD video too. You loose some FPS (frames per second) but for the price the camera is awesome.
Ok tips and tricks:
1: if you dont have a firm grasp of aperture, depth of field, rule of thirds, shutter speeds, iso, white balance, leading lines, noise, temperature, warm, cool, lighting, etc then go to your local camera shop and sign up for their digital photo classes. Any good photo shop does classes at least 1 time per week. When you understand all these terms and how they work together you can maximize your cameras potential.
2: practice. Disregard shooting with shutter or aperture priority and shoot in full manual until you know what your doing. Make the camera work for you the way you want it to, not you working around the camera. After you get step 1 down, its time to put it all together and practice. Once you have a good feel for the camera and what your going to shoot, then you can start using priority features on the camera. But you should know before hand how to set it up manually so you know what the camera is doing when you assign priority.
3: raw, jpg, card sizes, and editing: Card sizes first. Lots of people like to get 8,16, even 32 Gig cards. I shoot with 4 gig cards, several of them. Preference is up to you. I choose small "high" speed cards to maximize speed and for safety reasons. I feel much safer having data on several cards rather than maybe loosing all my pictures if something happens to the 1 card.
If you have a good photoediting program I would shoot RAW. The power of editing a RAW type is amazing. If you dont have editing software and you dont have large storage cards, then shoot JPG. Again using the software will take practice and some training. But remember. PHOTOGRAPHS come from the camera and you, not photoshop. Dont rely on software to fix your mistakes.
Good luck out there and post up some of your results!
