I'm new and learning, please critique if possible

You may not be satisfied with these but you aren't that far off track, just shows you can see they could use some adjustments and improvement and you need to keep learning.

With the first one, shooting toward the sunrise with changing light was probably more challenging to meter and make adjustments. I sometimes aim the camera somewhat downward and meter the scene I'll be photographing then reframe the shot, instead of metering aiming directly toward the light coming in from the background. Your camera's meter may have been reading the light coming from off in the distance. (And remember you're looking thru the lens with an SLR and you can't keep looking into the sun any more than you can without a camera; sunset and sunrise can be great times to take photos you just need to know when to stop, that it's too bright or getting too dark to continue.)

The camera is recording light, so in the second one there just wasn't much light to record an image. This type shot might work doing a long exposure, but I've taken pictures of holiday light displays, etc. with fairly standard settings. Your camera must have set the shutter speed pretty slow since it looks like shutter blur. Or could have been movement blur if the shutter speed was fairly slow and you weren't braced enough to stay still enough for a somewhat slow shutter.

With the last one, think about what's in the frame when you look thru the viewfinder - what do you want the viewer to see? is everything in the frame part of the scene/part of the picture? or do you need to reframe? I'd say this would have been better without some of what's off to the right; it looks like there's something interesting back there but that's probably another picture altogether. This might have been better if you'd moved your feet, moved yourself... maybe a step or two/a few to the right or possibly in a step or so might have gotten this framed better. Do we need to see the underside of the patio? Probably not, what seems interesting is the railing and umbrella etc. I do like the vantage point looking up from below to get the underside of the umbrella.

It sounds like from what you discussed that it would help you to get a good understanding of aperture and shutter speed and how those work together. Figure out what shutter speeds work for you with the camera hand held to prevent blur from a slow moving shutter. Figure out what happens to the background, with the depth of field (distance/area in focus), when you shoot at larger or smaller apertures. Learn more about ISO, the measurement of light sensitivity, and do some test shooting to see what ISO under various low lighting conditions works well.

It's always a matter of adjusting those settings to what works best in a variety of light conditions. It takes lots of practice too, so if you like it enough to keep at it you'll probably start figuring out what works.
 

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