chris_koffend

I really like this shot, but what grabbed me is the penguin/gull head just up and to the left of center.  It looks to me like the head of a penguin/gull (relationship to ice/cold) and the appearance that it is attached to a seals body (relationship to water), in a partially curled state to keep warm.  Overall, I find it a very appealing image, almost like a piece of Eskimo art.

I understand what you were going for with cutting of part of the head, but why not just crop (during the shot) further and cut out the whole body and the portions to the side of the red stroller?

No offense intended, but presently it looks like a quick snapshot.  Which by the way, too many of my photos look like! 

 

You have a great location with this shot.  You have a difficult exposure parameter to address, in this case, you have under exposed the young lady and over exposed the sky.

This is really a shot that you need some flash to bring out the person while you expose for a beautiful background and sky (which will give you more color saturation).  I don't know how high the rocks to the camera's left go, but I would have been tempted to use those rocks as my light source and aim my flash to bounce off of the them to expose your model while capturing/exposing for the natural light in the background.  By doing this, you would have achieved more depth to the photo as your model would have popped more against the background.

The current picture is fairly flat due to the lighting.  Check out this link for some ideas on how to use flash without anybody knowing you used flash.  http://neilvn.com/tangents/flash-photography-techniques/

In a case like this, using fill flash (which I try to bounce whenever possible), I would also bracket your exposure and/or flash.  It is better to have 5 not perfectly exposed shot and 1 shot with perfect exposure than it is to have 10 shots with non perfectly exposed.  Often times, it takes until we get back home until we realize the exposure could have been better.

You will hear lots of self proclaimed "purists" espouse that using a flash is wrong.  And if done poorly, it is.  But if they could learn to use it correctly, which is not easy, they would change their minds quickly.  Not all shots are better without flash than with proper executed flash (and I am not talking about a truck load of equipment, wireless slaves, etc. . . just a true on-camera, hot-shoe mounted flash).

Composition I will leave to others to comment on.

FYI, I am no expert and probably shouldn't even be commenting.  I commend your courage to seek critique, feedback and gain knowledge.  

I like this shot as it immediately presented a relaxed feeling upon immediate viewing - conveyed a sense of emotion. Only thing I would consider is to crop out the bottom 10% of the photo to eliminate the vignetting in the bottom corners.

How awesome!