Beautiful photography.
This is what we were looking for you to accomplish with this assignment. You’ve effectively limited your color palette which allowed you to draw your audience’s attention to the more important parts of the photograph.
You’ve done many great things with the composition of the shot. For starters, your use of space is great. You’ve used the trees in the background to provide not only a limited color spectrum, but also context. You’ve blurred them, but your audience still has reference to what they are. The trees also slope down a little which exposes the sky. The sky is completely burnt out / blown out (i.e. overexposed), but blown out skies that look intentional don’t bother me that much. Digital cameras also have a difficult time handling latitude and therefore often blown out skies. You can read more about this in a recent blog post we published here:
http://photographyicon.com/blog/2008/11/26/digital-cameras-latitude-dynamic-range/
You’ve also used space very well. Your main subject (i.e. the statue) is looking right and therefore you’ve left more negative space on this side.
The lighting for the shot is also soft and coming in from the side which helps keep the exposure right and also helps bring out the textures. I can see water damage on the statue which looks beautiful. The soft lighting wraps around the statues face without creating any unsightly shadows.
My only recommendation would be to look out for noses. Notice how the statues nose goes past their cheek? Obviously you can’t move the statue but if you reposition yourself you could either get more of a profile or go to your right more to bring the nose in front of you so it doesn’t come out past the cheek. In statues it’s not that important and what you’ve done isn’t wrong, but as a general rule of thumb when you’re shooting portraits you try to keep the nose from going past the cheek.
For example look at this shot.
http://www.digitalpicturezone.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/portrait-photography1.jpg
Notice she is still looking to the side, but her nose does not point out past here cheek?
I hope this helps!