Not that I'm an expert on this - but here are my tips (for equipment/still photos):
- Flash: I think you should avoid using flash as a primary light source at all costs (I'm talking about the cheap built-in flash unit). Horrible - overpowering, shadow-casting, glare inducing light. Every speck of dust or minor imperfection on the subject will literally glow. If you have expensive dedicated flashes or studio lighting with diffusors, relection panels, etc, then it can be great. Daylight with the sun is also too harsh by itself. You can experiment with a combination of daylight and flash, whereby the flash acts as a "filler" to partially fill in some of the hard shadows from the sunlight. Overcasts days give more diffuse lighting but you may still need fill flash. Indoor lighting is hard to get right without expensive equipment - I've used a couple torch lamps (tungsten) and it works OK (with tripod), but be careful about the color balance...
- Tripod: Without flash you will definately need a tripod or some sort of stabilization device. If possible, use your camera's self-timer mode so that pressing down the shutter button doesnt cause image shake (mine has a 2-second timer, which is perfect). With tripod you will have much more freedom on your range of shutter speeds and apertures - without it you can't really go below 1/60th of a sec shutter speed, but with it exposures of several seconds work great!
- Reciprocity: The relationship between shutter speed and aperture is called the law of reciprocity, and it may be beneficial to read up on it. Aperture controls depth of field, which is cool when you want to focus on a foreground subject and have the background soft and blurred.
- Color balance: Heh, this is something I need to work on. Light bulbs are tungsten and their light is yellowish and very warm. Flourescent light is green. Daylight is more bluish. Flash is like daylight. With traditional cameras you have to use different film types or use filters to compensate for the lighting type. If you're using a digital camera you will need to set the white balance to compensate for the lighting type. I need to read the damn manual of my cam and figure out how to set this. Mixing 2 types of light in the same photo is bad, very bad!
- Composition: The subject will often look poor when perfectly centered. There's a "rule of thirds" that subjects usually look better 1/3rd of the way from a side. Just a general guideline, though. Look at good equipment "glam" shots and see how they handle the composition.
