First plea for C&C, let me have it!

Shot my niece and sister-in-law yesterday and came away with some keepers that I was happy with. Rather than posting those, I thought I would post a couple of the shots that I wasn't happy with and have you guys tell me what I did wrong and how I can improve.

I'm just getting into this so I'm shooting on a Rebel XS with a 50mm f1.8 II and a 430 EX. We were shooting at a local garden with lots of random shade, which made things difficult at times. I know that I could quickly make these better in post, but I wanted to post the straight-out-of-camera shots so that I can learn how to get things right in the first place. So, here goes...

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...and what am I doing wrong with sizing these pictures? I'm using DPP and have the Batch Process settings at 200 DPI, Image Quality of 5, and max length of 1092 pixels in order to get it under the 150KB limit. The pictures uploaded here are VERY grainy and do not look like that in DPP on my screen

Nobody??

It looks like you biggest problem is under exposure and no life or contrast/pop to the photos. I played around with one of them.

Im nooo pro but i would say with that cam and flash, shoot in AV and set the W\bal to auto then sync the flash. your so dim its going to be a pain editing. there is so much color in this shot and being under exposed hides it all.

pics lacks liveliness and underexposed. maybe a flash to fill the subject would turn out better.

While bringing up the levels helped the last one, the composition is not interesting. You have the back of the baby's head and mom's nose. Try shooting from a different angel to get more of their faces. Maybe shoot down low from the left over the flowers to try to bring more of their faces into view.