Fall romantic shot, pls C&C

[shortduck]

Pic 1:Canon EOS REBEL T3i : -ƒ/2.8 - 1/500 - 50mm - ISO 100

I wanted to capture this couple with fall colors in the background

Pic 2: Canon EOS REBEL T3i ƒ/2.8 - 1/250 - 50mm - ISO125
Wanted to capture fall color bokeh.

Pic 3: Canon EOS REBEL T3i : ƒ/3.5 - 1/160 - 50mm - ISO100
What could I have done to make this picture better?

 

[CherylL]

Love the colors on all 3 of the fall foliage.
1. Her jacket and shoe are overblown and distracting. I would have posed her with her legs mermaid style. I like the connection of them looking at each other.
2. I would crop this at the bottom even though that would crop his right hand. That would eliminate the straight on crouch shot.
3. Jacket is bright. Did you shoot in raw? Maybe lower the highlights. I like the connection they have with each other.

 

[waday]

I agree with @CherylL, the colors are great. The jean jacket in both are blown, maybe darken a tad if you can.

I would like to pose a question to you... why did you choose to compose the images as you did?

I think the composition is ok, and these will look great printed and shared in social media. However, I personally would have composed them slightly differently. There’s a lot of negative space that I don’t think is being used properly.

For 1), maybe a closer crop? They seem so far away and there’s so much unused space on the left.

For 2), move the camera down and capture his whole body. Being cut off there with all the space at the top of the frame hurts the image. But, I love his interaction with the camera.

For 3), I’d change this to portrait orientation and capture the whole bodies. Otherwise, maybe do a tight crop now on them. There’s so much love there, make sure you show it! See below:

 

[shortduck]

Thanks CherylL and Waday for your constructive comments.

waday: My response to your question is: I wanted to capture their chemistry [aka love], together with the beautiful fall colors.

I now realized that the Jacket is too bright and blow away, these are all RAW and not touched in any way.

Thanks for the comments regarding cropping.

 

[SquarePeg]

Great job of capturing their emotional connection. The advice and critique above is excellent. If these are unedited raw files then you can easily improve them with some sharpening and maybe some burning on that jacket. That first one you could lower the exposure and/or highlights a bit to improve it. It's a nice photo! Since your photos say OK to edit I took a quick stab at it. Hopefully you can get more out of the raw file than I was able to pull from the jpeg download.