Photography 101 :: I think I'm making progress!

(We have a winner for the giveaway from Amanda's Beans, and it is [drumroll] Mrs. Danielle Warren! Yay! Danielle, I've sent you an email, so if you're reading this and didn't get it, write to me, please! And remember, you can get free shipping on your order from Amanda's Beans with coupon code ZEROSHIPPING.)

I'll just warn you right off the bat, this post is going to contain a lot of pictures of children you probably don't know or care about, so if you don't want to watch me try to muddle my way through my camera's manual settings with various adorable children, you might want to skip this post.

If you read that previous sentence and still feel like reading this post, yay! You may or may not recall that I'm trying to figure out this whole photography thing, and I think I'm starting to get the hang of it! (You can see some previous photography posts here.)

This is one of my sweet little nieces, who very graciously let me snap a billion photos of her while she was visiting us earlier this month. I really owe a thank you to the Pioneer Woman's aperture series for making sense of what I find to be a kind of confusing concept (smaller numbers mean a bigger opening? huh?), as well as this post from I Heart Faces that discusses creating a blurry background with your kit lens (as much as I'd love a fancy-pants lens, I guess I should figure out how to work with what I've got before upgrading . . . but it kind of makes me sad that, in the picture below, that was the absolute best my lens could do with aperture).

I'm also learning to adjust the ISO for bright outdoor shots (like the one above, which had an ISO of 100) as well as dimmer indoor ones, like the one below, which used an ISO of 800 (I found this post from Shabby Blogs to be the most helpful to me in explaining ISO).

(do you recognize this girly from this post?)
So now for my questions to all you photography geniuses out there . . . I've mostly worked on shooting either in full manual or aperture priority mode--what mode do you use? I'm sure that working in full manual is probably the best choice for really getting the shot you want, but I feel like it takes me soooooo loooooong to get everything set up just so, that by the time I'm ready to actually take the picture, the moment I wanted to capture has long since passed. I'm sure speed comes with practice, but any tips on getting to be a little faster in manual mode would be appreciated!

And I also want to work on . . .

 editing!
I wanted this adorable photo of my niece and nephew to have sort of soft, vintage-y coloring, which I obviously could not achieve. Now, I don't have Photoshop . . . I've generally used the oh-so-fancy Picasa to edit photos, and I just downloaded gimp (the so-called "free photoshop"), which I'm sure is fantastic, but is also kind of confusing. Do any of you use gimp? Do you have any tips or tricks? There are so many free photoshop action set downloads out there on the interwebs (like these and these) . . . are there gimp versions? Because you know I'd rather just download something to fix my pictures than learn how to use the program myself, and my googling isn't getting me very far.

Thank you in advance for your advice--you guys always have such fantastic ideas for me--and I hope you all have a lovely weekend!