When you're shooting, it's best to keep light behind you, not your subject.
For more natural photos, try to avoid using the flash.
Move closer to subjects, crop freely in the camera, and adjust your position to get a distinctive point of view.
The rule of thirds says to keep subjects out of the center of the image; instead, move them to the sides or up and down a little in the frame.
To import photos, you just plug your digital camera into your Mac, decide if you want iPhoto to delete original images from your camera, and let iPhoto do the rest.
To move folders of photos into iPhoto from other locations on your hard disk, you just drag the folder into the iPhoto window.
An important step right after you import photos is to do some quick adjustments, deleting bad images and rotating the remaining images to be oriented properly.