Rileigh

New to portraiture, any comments or advice would be greatly

appreciated, thanks!

Hello Tim,

Portraits are challenging but also rewarding when you get it right.

Compositionally, I would recommend keeping all her feet within the frame so it feels she is in the centre. The sky up above could be cropped very slightly so that the horizon sits along the two third mark. Then we come to the most important part, lighting! It looks like you have lovely light but you haven't quite utilised it. The shadow on her face and around her isn't want we want to see. So you needed for the sun to brighten up her face covering it uniformly. I think you could have used fill flash to light up the darker parts of the face.

The important thing is to keep on taking shots like this and keep on looking at other photographers work, especially the genres you enjoy. There would come a point when you realise exactly where you need to be.

Best wishes

I think Starvy has given a lot of good advise above, one little comment to add to it focus on her face so that you get more details.

Regards

Gamini

All good advice! I've always done landscape work so this is somewhat new to me. Thankfully, I have lots of nieces and nephews to practice with!

The only flash I have is my on-camera one, which I hate to use. It looks terrible IMO, so I've always tried to take advantage of natural light. Any recommendations for supplemental lighting while working on location shots like this?

Good for you!  Branching out to a new genre, and with models like this you can't go wrong.  The lighting here isn't helping you a lot and without a flash it's a challenge.  You can try using your on camera flash but dial it back to -.3, -.7 or even -1.0EV and see how it works; or use a reflector.  In this case I've taken your image and applied some mid-tone brush work to the shadows (especially the eyes) and applied just a hint of vignette.  See how it looks to you, but note that you can do much better with the full resolution file.

I don't have any sage advice except that it is my opinion that the eyes are the soul of a portrait and the lighting (or post work) has to bring them out.

Anyway, keep at it...  Mike

More good advice! I agree about the face/eyes. In fact, I applied some lightening to the shadows. I was worried about going "too far" but perhaps I didn't go far enough. Gonna take some practice as to what feels natural to me. This was quite an extreme light situation situation and led her to look away from the sun a bit.  I'll get there. Thanks again!