"One of the luckiest things that can happen to you in life is, I think, to have a happy...

A cute child, with amazing eyes--your timing on this shot was very good to catch such a powerful expression here--nice! The foreground composition is also very well done, with the blue structure and cords forming a nice counterpoint to the softer curves and warm tones of the child. One of the hardest things I've been wrestling with in my own work is how to get better control over the background in an image--I tend to be so fixated on whatever it is that I'm literally and figuratively focused on that I don't put enough effort into making sure that the background complements my subject rather than distracting from it. In this case, there are several distracting elements: (1) the girl's head is superimposed on the black bin, so the two tend to be perceived as a single form; a step to the right would have solved the problem by setting her head against the light wall. (2) The sunshine on the pavement on either side of the girl's face makes her face seem very dark in contrast; lowering the camera by about a foot would have put the sunshine behind her shoulders--still not good, but it would have made it easier to see her face. (3) The other issue with the sunshine is that its presence turns this into a very high-contrast image--to avoid blowing out the sunlit area, you needed to keep the shaded area fairly dark, so the parts we're interested in actually appear underexposed. That's a problem that couldn't have easily been dealt with on site, but it is one that can be partially compensated for by darkening the sunlit areas with an image editing program, then bringing up the exposure over the entire image. One thing you might enjoy experimenting with for images like this is to use as wide an aperture as you can get away with. That can remove a lot of background distractions by throwing the background out of focus, though it doesn't tend to solve contrast problems. Anyway, you have a very good eye for catching a powerful moment and for framing a very effective foreground composition!