A father knows best.

I'm trying to learn how to do this. All comments and critiques are not only welcome, but

greatly needed for me to improve.

Hi Chad,

first of all you captured a beautiful and peaceful smile and that's a good start. The picture is a little too big and I have to scroll up and down in order to see it all. I don't like the sepia-like tone, I would do it in B&W and work a little with exposition-gamma or levels. Another technique to get a good B&W to start with is selecting black as a foreground color and then, on the levels palette, select "gradient map" (you find it under the icon that looks like a black and white tao). If you didn't understand anything I said ... well... you should get Photoshop CS2, a CS2 tutorial or handbook and start messing around trying to follow the directions and memorizing bit by bit, that's how I started.

Nice profile shot. I think would have been better as a head and shoulders shot with a shallow dof.

Oh, I forgot: I would crop a little from the top and the left.