A friend wanted to get a picture of her daughter in her grandmothers dress
It's west Texas spring - so windy is the name of game. We went down into a river bed where it was nice and green with lots of trees. The dust added a nice smoky look and caught the sun rays. Used a low apature to get everything but her eyes a bit soft. Warmed up the picture sharpened the eyes and lighted up around her second eye where the flowers we casting a shadow. I wished her hands were showing a bit more and I would have turned her a bit to get the shadow off her eye. But for a 7 year old not wanting to take pictures I was really pleased with the results!
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Nice shot, I like the idea and can see you were going for a very dreamy look here and did your best to execute that with ambient light and available settings. I just wish this was a shot of a little girl wearing flowers on her head, not flowers resting on the head of a little girl. I hope you understand and see the difference, because the flowers - in terms of size, colour, sharpness, everything really - completely dominate the shot. She is almost an afterthought. A simple daisy chain or something similar would have worked so much better, that headpiece looks like what the MIL would wear.
Technically, I don't understand why you used such a shallow dof. The eyes are not in focus and having to rely on pp tricks to fix them is very weak. Unless you have razor-sharp focus on the eyes, never, ever use such a shallow aperture for a portrait. The fast shutter speed is understandable for a fidgety child, but an ISO of 400 that nearly blows out the right side of the shot and thus gives you yet more to fix in post...not necessary. ISO 200 should be your max for daylight, esp with sunlight and so little dof.
Sorry to be harsh but I want you to see where you went wrong, and try to help you from making the same mistakes in the future.
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