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Gwen and everyone posting portrait images,
I'd like to offer a couple of suggestions. Not about the portrait but about the image quality.
For ideal circumstances for critiquing, the image should be larger and better clarity. You can post up to 400 pixels wide and 600 pixels high.
Additionally, when you scan, you want to scan at as high a dpi as your computer can handle.
Lastly, your image is suffering severely from over compression, a common mistake when saving files as a jpg file. Somewhere in your graphics program, when a file is saved as jpg, there is an option to select the level of compression. You want to choose high quality compression.
After I resize an image down to the size I want and just before I save it, I use "unsharp mask", which is the proper option to use over simply the "sharpen" command. In any event, you want to use this judiciously or you'll end up with too much of a good thing.
Take a look at the quality of this portrait image by Tom Edgerton. It's a good example of what can be achieved in image clarity with the proper steps.
One last note for anyone with AOL. If you haven't turned "image compression" off in your AOL options (or is it preferences), then you'll need to do so to see the highest quality images.
Good luck!
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