Kelly,
Brace your self.
You have come a long way. Thanks for all the Karma points. Scott seems to be following the amateur path to pro photography. By this I mean, he starts without a basic understanding and allows auto to do a lot of the work and then tries to understand what is happening and eventually learns what went wrong.
I gave you the rules you said you were looking for. Calibrate, meter and evaluate. As your understanding of the what numbers come up most often grows, so will your ability to evaluate a scene. I truly believe this is the fastest way to learn the scientific part of photography, not the fastest way to get just an image, any image on film.
Photography is a science and an art. Good science is the ability to develop procedures that will give a consistent result so that you can identify the factors that give a different result.
Art is just not taking pictures of ugly things.
