specs question

Let's see if I have a small grasp on this....ISO 100-200 for outdoors and numbers move accordingly to amount of light in shot. You choose your aperture based upon what type of DOF you are wanting. blurred background vs. full sharpness and then shutter speed based upon your aperture. I know there are many variables but I am seeing if I am in the right direction. Thanks

Basically, yes.

It's all about getting the "correct" amount of light onto your sensor to get the "correct" exposure.

If you think about it like a hosepipe:-

Aperture determines how wide the pipe is
Shutter speed determines how fast the water goes though
ISO determines how fast the sensor gets soaked

you'll see that changing each of those parameters and balancing them against each other can all result in a correctly moist sensor. But as you rightly said, different combinations have have different benefits/side effects.

Typically, you choose the setting that you really have to control (i.e fast shutter to freeze action, or wide aperture to control depth of field) and change the other two parameters to suit the exposure.

http://digital-photography-school.com …e-in-digital-photography/

Shoot in Av mode - let the cam pick the shutter speed. But be aware of it in case it's too slow for freezing movement. Unless you are delierately trying to limit dof, realize most consumer lenses do better stopped down a bit. There is no shame in f/8 outdoors. If you are shootnig a canon cam, up to iso 400 looks all pretty much the same, but outdoors, you are correct, drop it down to 100 or 200 - it'll give you more leeway for using shallower dof.

I shoot ISO 400 without hesitation at all on the crop cams and ISO 800 on the 5D without a second thought when I need more shutter speed.

for shooting without flash i find manual completely unnecessary. As long as you understand exposure compensation, you dont ordinarily need the heartache of manual.