Big brown eyes

Critique appreciated.

There's no exif data, but this looks like a wide-open shot on a large aperture lens. The challenge here is that the in-focus field is very narrow. Unfortunately her eyes are not in it. It looks like it's half way between her shoulder and her chin. If one gets nothing else right in a portrait it has to be that the focus is nailed on the eyes.

Composition-wise, I'm not a fan of cutting off the top of a person's head. There's too much of her dress. So the shot is off balance. I think you could also crop it with her a little off-center, giving her less room on the right. See if warming it up a tiny bit improves her skin tone. It looks faintly blue.

I'm not taken by her expression.

I think this one needs another try. Sorry.

The exif data shows up on my screen, I shot 3.5 at 46 mm on my 2.8 sigma zoom lens, with 1/160 ss. I agree that the eyes don't look tack sharp here, but on my jpeg file they look sharp, quite a bit more actually, and with more skin texture. The cutting off the head is a bad habit of mine, but I also happen to like it like that.

This and a few others were shot over an hour, since I can't force her to pose. I'm not sure if you've ever done 2 yr olds, but you get what you get. Sometimes I can get a nice big smile and hit the shot, sometimes not. But this is a nice little smile nonetheless.

I'm not sure how else I could crop it, maybe just to where her shoulder is.

Thanks for the feedback.

I like to crop portraits into the head, but it's certainly not suited for all occasions or tastes as exemplified above. In this case I think your crop went a little too deep. Cropping the remainder of the image as suggested by Joe will help balance the composition.

I also don't think the eyes are terribly OOF, but they are dark and as a result they appear to lack some detail. I don't know what editor you use, but you could lift the exposure of the irises a little bit to bring out some detail. There are a number of other actions you could perform too, but a lot of that comes down to personal taste, and it's very easy to go overboard with it.

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Could I have your permission to make an edit, and to post it?
I have something in mind that I think might make a positive difference.

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Sure. I assume you'd like the raw file, but I'm not sure how to send it.

Here's a different edit. I lightened the eyes, warmed the wb and cropped.

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atsilverstein wrote in post #17905778
Sure. I assume you'd like the raw file, but I'm not sure how to send it.

No, I don't need the RAW. I just wanted to show you something simple.

The main thing I did was to remove the dark lines under her eyes.
In this edit I only removed the lower, darker lines.

this is much better. nice job.

Final edit - I lightened under the eyes and warmed it up a touch more.

Thanks all.

Looks great although I personally would have shot it in vertical orientation and not cropped into her head.

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atsilverstein wrote in post #17907013
Final edit - I lightened under the eyes and warmed it up a touch more.

I love it! Really nice work!

I actually think that cropping into her head works really well for this image, so I guess that makes me the oddball.

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Thanks!

Yeah I'll have to pay more attention to the framing.. I'm too focused on the eyes and forget about including the top of her head but I also like a cropped head so I'll just have to be more careful.

It's your best one yet, well done.

Thank you