1st real portrait of my girlfriend

[SnowSpyder86]

This is my first shot ive taken of my girlfriend and tried to make it good. I need real critique here, for i am very new to DSLR and photography in general. Please give me something to build on.
http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=26932678&size=o

[Croasdail]

nice pose and all that - beautiful girl... and great concept on the BW... but the highights are washed out and you have no blacks.... there are a bunch of ways to get to BW from color - and different ones work with different source media. A quick way to see what the image has in it is to go to "adjust brightness and contrast" - then compress the image using the sliders... this will help by compressing the spectrum and giving you a richer image. I would also go ask of in "post-processing" on some suggestions on how to colour to BW coversion... I am sure you will get a lot of feedback. Cheers.

[grego]

I think you cut her off too much(because her hands draw you in to the right side). You have all that empty area in the frame on the left.