Welcome!
Hello Bazinga, welcome to the Pentax Forum.
You've got a good camera now, hope you enjoy it. My advice is to take lots of different photos, in all kinds of conditions, light, subject matter, etc. Just get familiar with the controls and shooting modes.
Most new DSLR owners tend to stick with Program or Auto mode, which will give you (normally) correct exposures, but overall the photos will fall into the 'snapshot' category and be somewhat bland. It also doesn't teach the user much, the camera is making all the decisions.
For a bit more input, try Av (aperture priority) mode; Here, you select the lens aperture with the thumb-wheel and the camera matches the correct shutter speed to provide the exposure. This allows you to decide how much depth of field the photo will have, within certain limits.
For example, say you're taking a head-and-shoulders shot, an informal portrait or 'candid'. Typically you'd want the subject's face to be in sharp focus, but the background elements to be out-of-focus (OOF) or blurry, For this effect, you would select a low-numbered f/stop (aperture, same thing) like f/2.8, f/4.0 or f/5.6. Higher f-numbers like f/8.0, f/11 and f/16 wouldn't be useful since they would make the background sharper, the opposite of what you want.
But for a scenic, a scene where you DO want all the foreground and background elements to be sharp, you would use the f/11 or f/16 aperture position. You decide what you want in the finished photo, then control the camera functions to provide it.
Then, if you don't already have a good post-processing (PP) app in your pc yet, download one as soon as you can. There are many free programs like Picassa or Gimp that will get you started in PP, an important part of digital photography. Think of it as a digital darkroom, without the chemicals.
But sooner or later, you'll find limitations with the free programs. Then I'd suggest looking into Lightroom or other upgrades for more control and options.
Shoot lots of photos and hope to see some posted here soon!
Ron
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