Critique An Attempt At A Portrait

Ermm... Not sure what you wanted to achieve here.
You have a busy background which distracts one's eye along with both vertical and horizontal attachments.
Some hotspots too.
This is an acceptable grab shot/snap but it's not what I'd call a portrait. Is this part of some candid street 'tography?
 
Yeah, not exactly a portrait - more a candid. It's very dark too which isn't helped by the vignette.
 
You've focused on the person, which is a positive. Otherwise I don't think there are many.

You used Av mode which is fine, but I would have opted for spot metering, as opposed to multi segment, this way, when you are pointing at the person, the person will be nicely exposed, as opposed to an average being taken.

Also the vignette doesn't help, as mentioned
 
This was back when I first got my camera. This was a candid photo - thanks for all the feedback, taken on board :)
 
^Joe said:
but I would have opted for spot metering, as opposed to multi segment, this way, when you are pointing at the person, the person will be nicely exposed,
Click to expand...

I have to disagree here. It would only give a good exposure if the skin tones are within a limited mid range of tones. Try that with a dark skinned black person and you'll get an over exposed shot. However, I do understand why you suggested it, because of the large areas of bright white... but spotting off someone's face would only really be viable with your average, lightly tanned, healthy white person. If it was a black person, you'd need +exp comp... so in that case, you may as well have stayed in evaluative and dialled in exp comp for the white shirt.

More than likely this shot looks dark because of rubbish processing. It's not dark per say, but grey... the tones are flattened.. the whites are grey, the blacks are grey... a good contrast, but under exposed image would still have very deep blacks. This doesn't.
 
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