After slapping myself repeatedly in the head after seeing the results of my Sunday's photography and paying 5 whole pounds to get them developed I thought the best idea would be to get some help on here!
I have a Praktica SLR camera, it's fookin old and it's completely manual. Seeing as I am a SLR novice I was quite pleased with the photos I first got which are on like page 5 of my album on Pinkbike, but as soon as I try to get experimental the camera metephotically slaps me in the face...
Anyway, even though I used the little chart on the back of my flash to get the right light levels I still got appaling quality photos back aferwards. Also, the little meter in the corner which tells you wether light levels are correct or not works sometimes and other times just doesnt do anything!
Can someone tell me what I am doing wrong here? Do I just need to increase the exposure or is the fact that the films are out of date contribute to anything? Any help would be much appreciated!

PS. the 3 pictures on Pinkbike are the only ones worth uploading after I fiddled with them on Photo Editor, the rest were either too grainy to repair digitally or much too dark! 

http://www.pinkbike.com/photo/?op=list&function=myphotos&photouserid=69157

The shop I got them done at scanned them in, to be honest i really did play around with them a lot in Photoshop to get them looking like they do now, The film speed is ISO 200? If that's the correct terminology! I took the pictures with Shutter speed at 60 and a flash, I also had the apeture pretty low at f16, this was what it said on the back off the flash but obviously I need to be looking at a larger apeture next time, maybe more in the region of f5-8 maybe? Also, another interesting point is that I took some really nice pictures of the river at the bottom of the hill which came out lovely so I'm assuming it can't be the film?

Ooooh it's all so confusing, bring on the digital age!

Thanks very much Roo, you've been a great help, I'll post up here next time I take some photos with the results of next weeks photos!

Cheers dude!