A child's curiosity (first post)

[Pinkribbons24]

NIKON D5000
ISO 400
Exposure 1/3200 sec
Aperture 1.8
Focal Length 50mm
no flash

I am fairly new to photography, and this is my first post here. I have read through the critique section several times and finally just got enough courage to post one of my own shots. I would love some feedback from the image. I love photography, but I also know I have so much to learn. I want to continue to improve and I know the only way to do it is to get some feedback from people who know what they are doing, so here goes!

I'm interested in composition, exposure, is anything distracting? Like it/hate it? I had a hard time with the sharpness, and would like some suggestions on how to improve that in future shoots with a non-stop 2 year old. any other comments and critiques are welcomed (i have tough skin, so fire away)

[Doug Sundseth]

Technical stuff first:

The photo looks a bit underexposed to me. (You're losing detail in the dark hair of the subject.) Adding a bit of fill light in post will recover the detail easily.

The white balance is cool (blue). A slight warming in post can fix this; the method depends on what tool you are using.

The composition looks a bit cramped. I'd try to frame with more space in front and behind the subject (more in front than behind, generally). I'd also crop down from the top and up from the bottom of the photo to remove most or all of the sky and the lower part of the dress. Neither adds much to the photo.

As to sharpness, wide open is seldom the sharpest aperture of a lens's range. Your shutter speed is plenty fast enough to freeze even a very active little girl, but your very limited depth of field means that in the time the lens takes to come to focus, your subject may well be out of the sharp-focus range. If you close down the aperture just a bit, you'll get a better optical result and just a bit more DoF. The downside is that your background blur will resolve more, so you'll need to be more careful about how you frame your shots.

Now, all that said, it's a very engaging photo. You timed the shot very well and chose a moment with inherent interest. You're seeing the shot, which is the art and the hardest to learn. The technical stuff is just craft and really not that difficult to learn.

Thank you for sharing the shot.

[Pinkribbons24]

thank you so much for your response. I know i have a lot to learn on the technical side and the pp so any comments and suggestions are a huge help. I really appreciate you taking the time to help out a "newbie" like me