Believeby
CalamitysMaster00Comment by HeiSch: Hello Sarah,
well you asked for some comments, so here they come.
First of all, I love the idea of making your own poster for the little girl with fairies.
Composition
Portrait will work much better than landscape. the entire left side, the bush, is not adding anything to your picture. You recognized this probably and then added 2 more fairies to somehow fill this empty space (?). This only thing you really accomplished was that you force the viewer away from what's important: the relation of the girl to the fairy. By only having one fairy in your picture you are focusing the viewer much more on what you want to show.
It is beautiful how you positioned the faily - right into the view of the girl. Fantastic job of her envisioning the fairy, btw.
I would place the writing completely out of the picture as well. Move it to the bottom. You don't want anything even close to the girl and the fairy. Move it out of the picture onto the frame or if you want it in the picure at the bottom but with a much small font.
I also would either crop her closer to the elbow or showing her body completely. That's your preference. Personally I'd go for the closer crop.
Try to figure out your camera how you could create a more shallow DOF. Tis will blur the background and helps focusing on the girl and the fairy.
Pay more attention to the background. one side of her face is dark, the other too bright. This unbalances the viewer and makes it harder to focus on her face. The darker you select the background, the more the girl will stand out, especially with the sun light highlighting her.
Work with levels, curves and contrast to make her pop out of the background even further.
Technical
You could have move the girl into the shade, avoiding the blown out areas of white on ther head, the left arm and parts of her shirt. But I lke your choice better, the blown out areas create a nice dream like look and feel.
Now probably the hardest part for you to swallow (after reading your profile ). You should use something to stabilize your hands when you take pictures. For snapshots to create memories, handheld pics are fine. But here you talk about a poster for your model. This means you will most probably print it in a bigger format. Here it needs to be crisp and sharp. What I learned from this site: if it has eyes - make them sharp. If you still don't like tripods, lean your camera against a tree, a rock, something that does not move. Don't get you hand between the rock/tree. Stabilize with both hands - and yes it will look funny how you look through the viewfinder - and then gently push the trigger. The result will be much crisper. If you decide at the end of your processing that you want the pic softer, you can always apply gaussian blur. The difference is: a blury picture because the camera moves and controlled blur after taking a good sharp shot.
Then there are some details you could work on. And here i"m trying to find the right way myself: sharpening the eyes, slightly dodging the eye-whites and teeth. There are excellent tutorials on this site how to do this.
My last comment: I like your idea of desaturating parts of your photo. What if you desaturate the background, leave the fairy in full color and only slightly desaturate the girl. I would not leave her in full color, but I would not desaturate her completely. This could show the link/connection between the girl and the fairy.
Please don't take this long list of suggestions the wrong way. Just trying to keep a little girl believe in fairies for alittle longer :)
Photographer found comment helpful.