Kim

My friend offered to model for me so I could try out my new 60"

umbrella. Any comments or critique would be appreciated. Thanks.

Wonderful portrait work, great light, details and skin tone, wishing you all of the best.

Seth,

Kim is a beautiful girl. I love the freckles on her nose. You have focused well on her eyes and she has good eye contact with the camera (viewer). The background is nicely neutral, but it looks like creases in the seamless paper in the lower left corner. It may be just shadows, but it looks like creases.

Be careful of having Kim tilt her head down and then look up at the camera. She is covering some of her upper eyelashes -- especially her right eye. Her blush and lipstick look good, but her lips do look a little dry. She should be more careful with the application of her mascara. Her upper left eyelash is clumped together and there appears to be no mascara on her lower eyelashes. A little eyeliner under her eyes would frame them and help to make them stand out even better.

Kim's skin tone looks a little on the orange side. It would be a good idea to remove or tone down the red capillaries in the whites of her eyes.

It looks like she is leaning her face in towards the camera. This makes her face look out of proportion to the rest of her body (larger). With your narrow depth of field this also puts everything, but her face, out of focus. I don't see a good reason to have any of her out of focus. An out of focus background is very nice and focuses attention on your subject. Parts of your subject out of focus will draw attention away from what is in focus. It is difficult to go wrong with having the entire subject in focus.

Your composition could be improved a bit. You have cropped quite far into her head. This implies a tight crop on the bottom. You would have to crop very close to her chin on the bottom. You couldn't really give her more headroom and keep the crop on the bottom because of the evident foreshortening. You could crop a little off the right side to give her better right and left compositional balance.

She has very nice catch lights, but they are below her pupils. You do not want shadows from her nose or her cheek bones to go towards the top of her head. Light should come from above her. 

Her pupils are quite dilated. If you use brighter modeling lights or have a brighter area to shoot her in, her eyes will not become so dilated.

You do not want her fingers sticking into to the picture.

The advertising (SK | photography) is not part of the photograph. Your name could be properly placed on a mat surrounding the photograph. Any advertising would be better placed on the back of the photograph.

Nice shot,

Mark