Just starting with digital - climbing shot.

[moments-of-inertia]

After my poor old manual slr finally kicked the bucket I've bought myself a snazzy samsung wb500 (which I'm still trying to work out)
Rock climbing photo from France last week, first few digital shots.



I'd love critique on all of it, especially the more technical aspects - I know I had the iso too high but is there anything else I'm glaringly missing?
Cheers, thanks.

[barabe]

First i would like to welcome you to DPS,

Second, you should read the rules for critique, we need to have the EXIF files to better critique technical aspects of the shot.

I love climbing as a sport, I have been doing it for the past 20 yrs or so.

For the shot, I would have croped closser to the climber to the right to get rid of the bystander and blown out foliage in the back. The climber position is not the best, right now we barely see her face but we see a lot of leggs in a not so flatering way. Maybe if you were up on top of the boulder at that same side to get the shot from a higher vantage point, it would have made it a whole lot better. Another thing is that the climber is supposed to be the main subject, should be in focus. Right now the boulder is in focus. To correct the situation, i would have passed to manual focus to get the focus right, instead of letting my camera decide for me where to focus. I would have also used a smaller aperture value to get more DOF and get the whole shot into focus. The smaller aperture would have also helped out by reducing the amount of light entering, reducing the adverse effect of high ISO you say you used.

[sanbaldo]

more DOF for me too!

[lputman]

Moved from critique due to missing required information for critique section.

[moments-of-inertia]

I'm sorry, I did read the rules, several times in fact. I was worried that as a new user people would jump down my throat if I did anything wrong.
Unfortunately, as stated in my post, I have only ever used manual cameras and have no idea what an exif is. The rules state "where possible" on that one so I presumed it was something to do with dslrs or something.
Sorry for annoying people.