***

Elegant, creative, aesthetic, very, very good! A kind of a retrospective portrait - wonderful. Moreover, a child / youngster looking like a child / a youngster, but also like an adult. Wow! This is the highlight here. Overwhelming. How did you perform? Awesome... Great craftmanship - Bravo! FAV. BR / Volker

A classic pose and lighting.  Very well presented... Mike

very nice shoot

Alexander,

This is a very well done portrait of a very pretty girl. You have captured her very expressive face. The directional lighting from "above" works very well. 

Her interlaced fingers in "prayer" look a bit awkward -- even deformed. Her fingers should be adjusted. Turning fingers "under" can make them appear cropped at a joint. This has a tendency to make her look like an amputee. 

Your depth of field is so narrow that parts of her are out of focus. You have focused on the eye nearest the camera which is what you are supposed to do. Your depth of field is so narrow that her far eye is clearly out of focus. It is not suppose to matter if the far eye is somewhat out of focus, if the near eye is in focus. The reasoning is that psychologically the viewer will consider the picture to be in focus if the eye nearest him or her is in focus. I'm not so sure this is true.  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. There is no doubt that you should focus on the eye nearest the camera, but I think your depth of field should be deep enough to cover all of your subject whenever possible.

You should have both eyes showing or one eye showing. You do not want to cut into her far eye with the bridge of her nose.

The catchlight is very nice, but I think that a more dominant catch light a little lower on her eye would look better.

You should soften her skin to remove any imperfections.

I have adjusted the brightness and the highlights on her face. I also cropped it a little to give it better top and bottom compositional balance and to provide a little more room in front of her. I also cropped out the light area on her right shoulder at the left edge of the frame. Burning-in her fingers might have helped some. I considered moving the crop on the bottom up, but I didn't really want to crop into her hands. It might have improved the balance a little more.

Nice shot,

Mark

Looks a bit as if she was praying. Well done.

nice capture