The pen looks pretty good.
You can pick up a graycard at most camera stores. You might have to ask more than one sales clerk but if they have any training at all, they should know what you are looking for. The idea behind a gray card is that it is "calibrated" to reflect 18% of daylight (ie 5000K color spectrum). Camera meters are also calibrated so that given control of the camera, they will attempt to adjust the exposure so that the metered portion of the frame has an average of 18% reflectance. I've glossed over a WHOLE lot of stuff there including things like metering modes, the 12% vs 18% reflectance controversy, color temperature, etc.
But the upshot is, if you first place the graycard in scene and pick a spot metering mode you can pre-meter the scene and get the camera's recomendation to make the gray card look like a gray card with the given lighting. Note down the settings recomended. You should be working in apeture priority mode and pick an f-stop about 1 or 2 full stops from the largest number (ie. if your lens goes to f-22, try and work around f-11 to f-16). I know that you will get advice that says use the smallest f-stop possible to get maximum depth of field. And while that is true, the problem is that lens design is one giant compromise and all things being equal, the best image quality is generally in the two or three stops below maximum (minimum size) f-stop.
So lets say you had the lens set for f-16 and metering the gray card, the camera says it wants to use 1/125 as your shutter speed. Now remove the gray card, switch to full manual mode and take a shot at f-16 and 1/125.
Oh, and since you are using a digital camera, you can pre-select the color balance based on the type of lighting you are using. If you are using more than one type (say incandescent + on-camera flash) you will have to experiment a little bit. But if say the primary light source is the camera flash (on or off camera) then pick daylight as your starting point.
As to image editing and re-sizing, that is a whole 'nother topic. One of the easiest ways to get the resizing to work right is to use quality software. If you don't have CS3 or CS4 (Photoshop) you can use The Gimp (google is your friend here) and try the cubic spline interpolation while resizing. It does a pretty good job. Free too.
Got all that?
One positive thing I'll say for digital cameras is they make proofing a lot easier. I don't use them much (my 8x10 film camera is about 32gigapixel equivalent resolution, but then what would you expect from an 8" x 10" negative) as I prefer the look and hands-on process of film.
