What a captivating portrait! She has such beauty! What a great image! I could go on. Ok I will! The colours are brilliant, I love the way you've got them all pastel from the blues to the yellows to the pinks. And the skin tones - so soft and gentle. I could go on. Ok I will! the expression and the purity of her eyes. This is a great image!

wonderful portrait!! I agree with mark.alexander5 above on all PLUS I love the capture of the casual 'pose'. Brilliant all around!
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Thanks! She's as cute as they come. of course I'm biased since she's my niece.

It was quite an impromptu session - she just hammed up when I came outside with the camera.

Absolutely Gorgeous! Mind sharing what lens and settings you used for this effect?

Sure: Let's see, where to start:
The lens is a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L and this shot is at 70mm (full frame) and 1/200 @ f/2.8 with some indirect fill flash.

So it's just a short telephoto wide open. A 50mm f/1.8 on a crop sensor camera will do the same thing much cheaper.

I can't remember if the flash was bounced off the side wall, or if I had my diffuser on. Either way it's not direct flash. Exposure was using Aperture priority mode (I always use this mode) and 2/3 of a stop underexposed (I always do this too - a hangover from my slide film shooting days when you didn't want to blow out the highlights and it's the same with digital). I'm almost always shooting within a stop or two of wide open for this type of shot. I do try to get sharp focus on the eyes, though that's tough when shooting impromptu shots.

Anyway, that's only just the first part. In Adobe Lightroom (highly recommended and much cheaper than Photoshop) I have a preset I made that provides a starting point for people pictures. It pushes the exposure up two stops, and ups the black clipping a tad to boost the lights which are usually the skin tones while darkening the rest. It also slightly touches the curves, but not much for the same reason. Then I'll adjust the black clipping more to boost that effect and adjust the white balance carefully so that the skin tones are to my liking - soft, natural, and innocent. At this stage it's pretty good - but I always make sure the eyes are bright and clear - lightening them up with a brush is usually necessary. Next I darken the surroundings a touch with either a small vignette, or a exposure brush in different places, or in this case a little of both so that the subject stands out from the background.

Whew! That's about it. Obviously I cropped at some stage in there too... So really the two keys for me are a good starting image than can be pushed, and then a little bit of custom work in Lightroom after the preset. Incidentally I believe it took less time to work on the image in Lightroom than it did to type this out so it's not onerous at all. Less than five minutes...

your children portraits are gorgeuos! i love your work...
(and the kids are beautiful as well :)