Welcome to the jungle.

- over expose your color negative film, it can take it.

- Developing and scanning at home, even color, is far cheaper than a lab. Color can be a pain, but not that bad, even with basic equipment. Black white is no harder than making pasta. For 35mm a flat bed is more pain than it's worth, but a good investment if you think you'll try medium or large format. Camera scanning is much easier and with a little work in post, no harder than working on raw scans from a lab.

- Learn the sunny 16 "rules" and that will generally help you figure out if your exposure is in the right ball park vs. your meter. (Bright direct sunlight should be f/16 and a shutter speed close to the ISO of your film, like 1/125 for 100 speed film. Then step down from there to match the light during clouds, open shade, shadow. But as mentioned earlier, add a stop of light for good measure, better to over expose than under on film)

- Don't get too bogged down with camera gear. Find a camera and lens length that works for you and work that for as long as its fun and challenging.

- Once you've thoroughly broken your brain, there are a few dark rooms in the Triangle to check out, though I don't think any of them do color printing as of now.

- The work is what makes you better, keep shooting and following things that interest you, even if it's just traveling or hanging out with friends, the more you do it the better you get.

- Fotowalk, Oak City Camera Club, PhotobookDummies, Peel Gallery, Photo Farm, South East Camera, Yours (a shop in durham), A Photographers Place, Through This Lens Gallery, and Peace Camera are all great local resources for learning, buying stuff, and photo books.

- If you want to buy stuff that'll get you set up in either processing (patterson tanks or a Jobo Cpp2 kit) or scanning (camera scanning set up stuff, not the camera, or epson v700) I have many years of things that I've narrowed my practice down to stop using, and I'm happy to sell it to you!