Composition critique please

[lkbart]

I was trying to get some color from the setting sun into a mostly colorless outdoor snow senior photo shoot & this is what I ended up with. I kinda like the photo, but it almost seems like the colors of the sun are so bright they distract, rather than add to the photo. I bumped the blacks up when opening the raw image & cropped a little off the left side, but that's pretty much all the processing I did (also watermarked & scaled down for posting - possibly too much quality reduction, as the image appears to be very soft here, but her face in the original is much crisper - like I can see a tiny shadow line on her face from one of the hairs from the "fur" under her right eye).

Any suggestions for a better composition or processing? Any other thoughts? Thanks.



Camera: Canon EOS 50D
Exposure: 0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture: f/5.0
Focal Length: 160 mm
ISO Speed: 400
Exposure Bias: +2 EV
Flash: On, Fired

[kelticsol]

It appears to be on camera flash turned up too much., I would have backed it off a little bit to better balance the backlighting from the sun.

Just my 2 cents. Hope that helps.

Edit: Or I would have probably underexposed the sun slightly and had it less prominent.

[lkbart]

Thanks - I didn't realize how over-exposed her face was. Since I shoot in raw, I bumped the exposure down & re-saved it. It does look a lot better. The sun is still bright (& I tried de-saturating just the sun area in this last processing), but at least it shows more color around her face now.