i was aiming for an overexposed background, however he ended upa little more exposed then i initally intended and the "I'm constipated" look is due to the brightness of the day outside. we were literally five feet from the ocean. i'll try the gray scale and also killing the red tones down a little and see what happens i'll post the results prob monday night. thanks again for all of your input. would love to hear what advice you have for my other work that is up.
Hmm, I am trying to figure out what you were going for here. I assume you were intentionally blowing out the background and overexposing the subject. Unfortunately, this also lost the shoulders completely! It also shows his red skin tone quite well - though, I am not sure if this is what you were going for.
It is neat that I can see you in his eyes.
Not an overly bad expression though. It looks like either he is thinking or has a headache, but still not a bad expression.
What were you going for in this photograph? I really think a 2.8 or 1.2 aperture would have done a bit better if your intention was to bring attention to his eyes. Here, it really looks like you just used too bright of flash and compensated for too dark of a subject (aka, blowing out the background). I understand the high-key aspect, but this just doesn't seem to hit it. You might want to try grayscaling the image or at least lessening the red luminance. The red in his face is really distracting from the rest of the shot.