Untitled

Your comments are welcomed.

Thank you.

Huy,

She is a very pretty girl. The eye contact with the camera (viewer) is very good. You have put the background nicely out of focus. Her skin tone is very good. Her make-up is well applied. I like her expression. The light coming from the side provides nice highlights in her hair and helps to separate her from the background.

I think you could have focused a little better on her eyes. They could be sharper.

The dark areas have little or no detail in them. You may have to adjust the brightness and contrast a bit. You want some detail in the blacks. The whites and her skin tone is excellent.

Your main light is coming from below her eyes. Notice the catch lights are below the center of her pupils. The name for this style of lighting is grotesque lighting. It has been (and still is) used in video and still photography to light vampires, werewolves, bad witches and other rather nefarious nocturnal nasties. Unless you are trying to make this girl out to be a very bad person, you probably should not use this lighting. I'm sure you have seen kids trying to make a scary face by holding a flashlight below their face and shinning it up to illuminate their face.

It looks like you used the flash on your camera as the fill light. That is where you get the tiny little catch lights in the middle of her eyes. You will want to remove them. It is best to have one catch light per eye.

It looks a little odd to have the fingers of her right hand sticking out. I would either show more of her hand and arm or none of it.

You want to compositionally balance the left and right sides of the photograph. The compositional "rule" for this suggests that you position the tip of the subject's nose in the vertical center of the photograph.

You have cropped into her hair. This implies that you will do a somewhat tight crop on the bottom -- at least more than you have done. It is not cropped enough on the bottom to compositionally balance the top and bottom of this photograph. You should either crop more on the bottom or give her some head room on top.

The scrolled decoration on her top looks like it will connect. You have cropped into that scroll pattern. The viewer's eyes will go to the sides of that scroll and follow the sides down and out of the photograph because there is nothing there to stop them. It would be best to crop below where the scroll comes together. This would allow the viewer's eyes to stay within your photograph. The same is true of necklaces and the collars of blouses. If you wanted to be this close to your subject a different top would be better.

I find the twigs or the edges of the leaves that are brightly lit on the upper left corner of the photograph to be so bright as to be distracting. You don't want anything that draws attention away from the viewer's face.

Nice shot,

Mark

Thanks all for your ratings and comments, I appreciate it.

A big thank you to Mark - well, you give me a long list of critiques, but I really appreciate it because all of the points you figure out are correct and it will help me a lot to improve my photos next time. Keep inputing more comments on my other photos as well, Mark!