Practicing for my Photography Course

Here are a couple of practice shots for the photo course I'm taking. This is for part of the hand metering assignment. The third full body shot was blurry so i have to redo this part of the assignment....grrrr! The camera focused on the bushes instead of the her but now i've actually read the camera manual and know how to make if focus on a particular spot (guess i should have done that when I got the camera :)). Now, I just need to think of a bribe to get Victoria to pose for me again. It's strange using the Manual mode on the camera, i've been so lazy using automatic for the last few years