Beginner, I would love some direction or suggestions

[Major Nikon]

5. I have a few suggestions

The first suggestion I have is to absorb as much knowledge as you can about photography. A good photographer with a cheap camera will take far better pictures than a bad photographer with an expensive camera. Knowledge and experience are what makes the biggest difference.

I'm not familiar with your exact camera, but the first thing I would recommend is to put your camera in manual exposure mode and take lots of pictures that way in various environments. By manual exposure mode I mean you will be controlling the ISO, shutter speed, and aperture settings. Knowing how to set these things manually, will help you much better understand what to expect when the camera does it for you and you will know better about when it's best to override those automatic features.

Study pictures that you like carefully and try to figure out how they were done. Many photographs you find on the web will have embedded data that can tell you the camera settings and other info. This web site can give you whatever data is available:
http://regex.info/exif.cgi