Portrait: Shakira

I am glad she was great to work with and yes she is very attractve so you have the basis for a good shoot. I can see why you shot her amongst these lipstick coloured flowers and agree it was a good idea. However, I find the bright flower in the foreground distracting and it unbalances the image. To balance it better you could have squeezed left, a tad, into the foliage so moving the flowers to the right of frame but still they might have been distracting, depending on other consequences of this move. If there had been a lot of the flowers, almost filling the frame, that might have worked too. I think the glasses are also distracting, made worse by being conjoined with the bright flower. I keep looking at these elements not her pretty face, and let's face it, her face is the subject and the point of the image. I like the fact that her head tilts, often a good thing. In this case it causes her gorgeous wide smile to align with the branch nearby, which is also a good trick, having elements running in the sme direction quite often works.

As she was good to work with, keep working with her. I am sure you'll get some great shots. This one is a bit ordinary but not far off being rather better. Below see some crops, which solve the problems. They also solve the problem of the 35mm format, which seems so rarely to work for upright portraits, because it is too narrow. The cure is to shoot for the required width and then crop the top and or bottom, making it more medium format in aspect ratio, providing more space left and right.

Cropped as below we focus on her face and it looks even better becasue we are only seeing her. Shooting with a wider aperture, to prduce extra shallow depth of field, would have worked well as would cropping tighter, for the same reason.

beautiful