Pic of a young man

[Evertking]

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[Merlin52]

HI Mike, thanks for sharing.
Nice exposure on the model. The unusual angle is not a winner for me, but the main problem I have is the grin on the subject which looks a little forced with the teeth clamped shut not helping..
A quick tip is to ask the model "OK, just breathe through your mouth.." - this makes them open their lips slightly and usually relaxes their pose.
The background highlights are blown which is not too much of a problem relative to the others as the colours work well with the rest of the image and give a nice hair-rim-light

[Manfred M]

Mike - you really seem to like having these very bright splashes of light in the background.

These are not a good idea as they are extremely distracting and take away from your subject. The issue is the human visual system, which is keyed to notice bright areas and areas of high contrast. If these are not your subject, this is not a good thing to have in an image, as the viewer's eyes are going to go straight there and past your subject. If the area is near or on the edge of the image, the eyes are going to move off the image; which is not what you want.

You have used a Dutch tilt in the shot. This technique can be very effective if the scene has a lot of horizontal and / or vertical lines in it, but this scene does not, so is going to be more negative as it does not strengthen the image.

Finally your "amputations" are very strange. You've ended up with an unbalanced image here; the camera left side is chopped off at the shoulder and the camera right side below the elbow. That adds a lot of (unwanted) negative tension to the image.

[Shadowman]

Nice effort, I recently got a thumbs down for a "dutch tilt" idea.