Think about rotating the camera to portrait orientation on about 50% of those horizontals
and your work will look like you have studied photography and composition. Try to use all of the compositional space, and not waste 40% of it on useless, out of focus backgrounds. Like the shot of the kid with the shoes slung over his shoulder; why is that framed horizontally? Why? No, make that why,why,why?
Or the B&W close-up of the big smile....why is that a wide-format framing? That looks amateurish, or more properly, "unstudied", unstudied in the sense of as if the photographer learned entirely from...random people on the internet....or is entirely self-taught ad has never read a single book about photography.
This is a pet peeve of mine, so don't let my words discourage you. I think your images look pretty decent, but I am a former full-time studio portrait shooter,and a 37-some-odd-year amateur photographer who has studied photography books,and photos, from the beginning of the art to today, as well as composition and art history; the incorrect, unjustified use of horizontal framing with a 3:2 aspect ratio camera is a HUGE problem with today's self-taught, upstart shooters. Maybe if they had used a 6x6 format camera for a few months or years, they would understand having to compose within a particular aspect ratio better, AND to have to envision BOTH an 8x10 or 5x7 frame in BOTH horizontal AND/OR vertical aspect ratios!
Learning to envision the pose, and then to fit it into the frame is much of what training in professional people photography used to be about. You can NOT take a pose, and then frame it WRONGLY, and look like a professional shooter. You need to tailor the pose to your camera, and you have a camera that captures in a 3:2 ratio. If you had a 6x6 Hassy or Bronica, or a 6x7 Mamiya camera, you could frame differently, but you have a camera with a wide, but not very tall frame, or another way of looking at it, a camera with a very TALL, narrow frame. Learn to use your camera's framing aspect ratio. Not just the camera, or lighting, but how to use the frame you have.
So, go back and look at the shot of the kid with the big smile, and the one with him and his tennis shoes hanging over his shoulder, and re-envision how both of those shots would have looked without all the dead, empty background in them, and more "person" in the frame.
