Photos

Hi Mark
Subject: As has often been said, before we press the shutter we need to ask, “why am I taking this picture”. Therefore, I wonder why you took this picture. Beggars in India are too easy to exploit for pictures. Many people would avoid doing so. It’s an integrity issue! I have occasionally taken (but never posted) pictures of beggars, but only if there was some other reason for doing so. Such a strong personality, interesting light or a relevant context etc, not just a beggar as being a beggar: it’s too soft and to exploitative.. It seems to me that a picture that just says “this child is poor because her cloths are dirty, is hardly worth saying.

Exposure: Sorry Mark but you picture is not well exposed. You have great pools of underexposure where the head merges with the background shadow etc, which is unsatisfactory. A key element of the scene is lost. I wonder how you metered you your exposure. It looks like an automatic exposure using a general reading, which was clearly not the right way to capture this scene. Your background wall (which is not important) is perfectly exposed) your main subject is not. You should, in my view, exposed for the child’s face.

Composition: To me this composition is not at all satisfactory. The children are placed to the far right and looking towards the right, thus, moving out of the frame. This looks very awkward placing the centre of interest far to one side and leaving the frame. Again, the girl is cropped just below the knee, which is an awkward way to frame a shot. Most photographers would have gone for, either a head and torso shot or (more likely) include the whole figure. Cropping parts of figures always poses challenges. It is not always easy to get it right. This image looks like an accidental grabbed shot, where the composition was not thought out.

Focus and Depth of field. Again. The two children are not in sharp focus, but the wall behind is. It looks like you used a center-weighted auto-focus, which selected the wall behind. Thus, you have a strange DoF where the children are not fully sharp but the background, which should not be sharp, is very sharp.

Context: The context of a portrait is important because it tells us so much about the people. Here the context is a blank wall and a cart, telling us nothing relevant. In fact, most of the frame is wasted, containing no relevant information. Your note has to say that she may be living in a shanty. If that is what you wanted to show, you should have gone for a picture including the shanty in the background.
Sorry if all this sounds negative Mark. I have often been helped by people who gave me honest but hard critiques, but never by people who told me that imperfect shots were wonderful.
Good luck with yur photography.