You can use any DSLR like a point & shoot camera. So from that perspective... sure... it's easy.
But if you use the camera that way... you're cheating yourself. The whole point of the camera is that it allows you to conrol so much about the exposure and get absolutely fantastic results. I tell people it's sort of like buying a Steinway and just expecting that, since it's a Steinway, you'll be able to play beautiful music with it. That would only be true if you took some time to learn to play a piano. The same is true of your camera.
The camera needs to collect a certain amount of light to get a properly exposed image. But it turns out there's more than one way to collect the light. You can collect the light slowly over a long period of time... or quickly over a short period of time. You'd think the results would be the same as long as you collect the same amount of light in the end... but they're not the same. How you capture the image, massively influences the artistic and creative results you get. You can freeze action, or let movement blur to imply motion. You can create an image which is sharp from front to back... or you can create an image in which only your intended subject is sharp and everything else is softly and artifully blurred.
The camera wont just "know" what effect you want to go for. But if YOU know the effect you want to go for... and you know the basics of exposure and what sort of things you can do to achieve the results you want, the camera is designed to make it very easy for you to manually control everything.
The good news is, you can learn the basics of controlling the exposures and getting some pretty nice results in a relatively short period of time. Some photography is more difficult than others -- much is easy to learn the basics, but harder to master.
I second Scotty's recommendation on the book "Understanding Exposure" by Bryan Peterson. It's written in language that assumes you know nothing about photography (you don't have to speak any special lingo or terms to do understand what he is teaching in the book - he'll teach you those terms as you go along.)
As for exposure triangle, here's a good video:
The video leaves out the fact that you can also control the lighting. If I'm trying to take a portrait of someone, I don't necessarily just take that shot where they stand... I consider the background, the lighting, etc. I move the subject into the light that I prefer and I place them in front of the background I prefer. I may add supplimental lighting somehow (either flash, or reflective surfaces, etc.) So the above video describes the basics of "exposure" but doesn't talk about lighting.
It turns out lighting will massively influence the results -- so you can get books on lighting. Composition (how you frame up your shot) is also a really big deal and influences how well people like your photography. You can get books on composition too. But hold off on lighting and composition and JUST try to learn about "exposure" first. When you think you're comfortable with exposure... move on to composition and lighting.
Good luck!
Tim Campbell
5D III, 5D IV, 60Da
