Portrait of my daughter

[Capturing.Life.in.Photos]

I am very passionate about taking portrait shots of children and I would love to improve, so please give me comments and feedback on what I could do to make this portrait better.
Thank you!

Panasonic DMZ-FZ30
Focal Length: 22.0mm
Exposure time: 1/100s
Aperture: F5.0
ISO: 80

1.jpg

[richard.beatson]

A nice photo but nothing more than a snapshot I'm afraid.

Your aperture setting of f/5 is not wide enough to isolate your subject and therefore the blue bars behind your daughter are in focus also which tends to throw your eye off.

Good start though. Keep shooting and trying different apertures and framing. Try tilting your camera too. This can give some nice effects with kids.

[kristenh]

i like her expression and love it when people appreciate looks other than the cheesy grin!

here's my thinking:

if you take a photo with elements that people know intuitively are vertical, you should try and make them vertical in the shot- otherwise people will overfocus on how they are off kilter.

before you snap, take a look at how the shadows fall on the subject's face- it'll look odd if a shadow falls across her face- esp if it is irregular

try to watch for a moment when she has her head tilted up a bit and the light is catching her eyes- eyebrows/eye ridges typically shade the eyes but they look so nice when they are all shiny

try not to cut off her hands.

scan the background- try to get more shots with a simple background- trees for example- that tells us exactly where to look for the subject of the photo

as richard said, try it with a more open aperture so that your daughter is in nice clear focus, but the background gets fuzzy. then she'll seem to pop out.

hope that helps!

[o.pulido]

I agree with the above comments. The only thing I would add is perhaps using some fill-flash to remove the terrible shadows over her face. Also,the cropping of her left arm is tight for my personal taste.
OK, hope this helps. Good luck!