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Looking for some good critique of this shot. What works, what

doesn't? Lit with on camera flash, bounced off a gold bounce card,

and natural light.

It looks nice to me. The only thing that might be holding this from getting perfect ratings is a slight lack in sharpness. Maybe a black boarder would give a better view on the crop(when viewing this on a page with a white background). But either way, it's way better than any of my photo's!

It's a combination of high-key and ... not high-key -- the background and the white shirt are completely blown out, while no part of the face approaches white (255), suggesting a lot of post work in Photoshop. 

 

The difference between the pure-white exposure on the shirt/background and the somewhat low-contrast-mid-range exposure of the face makes the photo a bit surreal, which in this case I find distracting. Maybe you could add a curves layer for the whole image and lighten up the face and hair a bit more to better match the apparent exposure of the shirt?

 

It also looks a bit like you did some work with the dodge/burn tool directly on the face. (Maybe this was a levels or curves layer with a partially brushed-in mask over the face?) The skin seems to have unnaturally uneven highlights and shadows that would either be caused by direct dodging/burning, or perhaps are actually natural, but they look odd because you obliterated the shirt and background in post. It looks odd because it creates mixed signals about the light source: was the light so bright that white was blinding, or was it a more even light that allows plenty of detail? This image has no obvious single light source, and so disturbs my eye.

 

With so many hair strands flying off to the side, my eye keeps looking for some individual hairs, which I think you also "trimmed" in post. Her head therefore seems implausibly round, especially at the top left side of the image, everywhere except for the middle right area where the large chunk of hair flies off to the right.

 

On first glance, this feels like a disembodied head. I want to see some evidence that her being has mass and edges below the shoulder, which you could accomplish by leaving in some detail in the shirt and letting it (and especially her left arm -- right side of image) separate a bit from the background.

I just noticed that you lit her by bouncing off a gold bounce card. That helps me understand why she looks so tan. For example, look at her lips, and where they transition to facial skin. The lips and face are very similar tones in this greyscale image -- very low contrast.

 

Her lips are very well defined, but that's despite the exposure -- it's just because she has full and well-shaped lips.

 

Try adjusting red levels a bit? That might help darken her lips a bit more and create better contrast in the mouth area. (Won't fix the light-source problem I observed, above, but it will help with facial contrast.)

 

I agree with the prior poster that the image seems soft. If you applied a blur layer for skin smoothing, mask out the eyes and mouth from that layer to recover sharpness there.