Critique for Freda

Firstly these images look over sharpened to me. I can't tell whether this is (a) over-sharpened by camera, (b) over-sharpened in post processing, (c) a result of compressing the images for email. In general I would look for female faces to smoother, male faces to be sharper as in each case its more flattering to the gender.

Nice pose, well framed, a little dark in the materials I feel a little brighter and more colour would help there. The angle of the instrument is very good, letting us see all the detail, it all goes to make an image with a lot of detail to be looked at.

Good portrait with the subject looking away from camera, to be really picky, the sitters right eye is just too far away, a slight turn of the head towards camera would help a lot.

When shooting grey backgrounds they do need to be quite clean. Try selecting just the background and applying a blur to it to see if it will clean up.

I like the pose, it's very dynamic - until we get to the head, which tilted down seems at odds with the rest of pose, a tilt upwards would have been better. This would also have fixed the over strong light on the nose and the dark "racoon" eyes. It's OK on this image, but normally I would worry about the fingers all knotted together.

Lovely low-key headshot. Normally you would look for some rim-light on the left hand side of the subjects head to provide some separation, but I like that there isn't any on this image. It does look slightly dark, it could probably lift a little in brightness.

Lovely cheeky look on the subject, nicely cropped below the elbows, strong contrasty lighting works well.

Just as an aside, this is a really good example of how side lighting brings out the textures in the material of clothes. Just look at all those micro and macro textures, folds and structure.

Good bit of posing, when the subject is leaning forwards it implies interest in the viewer - just as in a real conversation you lean to somebody when they are interesting.

What is a shame is that there's no catchlight in the eyes. They could do with a little sparkle I think.

Whereas the lean away clearly shows no interest in the viewer !

Good slouchy, teenage, pose. I like all the awkwardness, angles, hands and general moodiness.

The trouble with this image is the head is just too low in the frame. Either the whole composition should be moved downwards and include more of the torso or the top needs to be cropped to a square image.

We do get hung up about showing the tops of peoples heads, yet once you get above the eyes there's really not much of interest going on there and cutting through the top of head also adds a dynamic to the image.

This image looks underexposed as well.

Brightening and re-cropping will bring this image a long way forward.

The hard lighting across the body has worked well here, just keeping the exposure in at the top and giving wonderful shape across the torso. The bright nose and dark eyes bother me. I think a tighter crop at the bottom to lose the folded leg and box may also improve this image.

Good varied set, a tiny amount of post processing would add a lot of finished to these images.

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