I would go with Ryan's answer if you really want to do this.
In general on a *nix environment, you always want to err on giving away as little permissions as possible.
9 times out of 10, 755 is the ideal permission for this - as the only user with the ability to modify the files will be the webserver. Change this to 775 with your ftp user in a group if you REALLY need to change this.
Since you're new to php by your own admission, here's a helpful link for improving the security of your upload service:
move_uploaded_file