Basketball with my boy. C&C welcome

[mistastixx]

 

[Philip Kendall]

Vague apologies for being a bit harsh here.

The first shot is a nice enough snapshot - but it isn't sharp and I find the grain of the background distracting. Technically, why are you shooting a portait-type shot at 1/400s, ISO 1600?

The second one needs work on the composition - the play equipment in the background draws the eye as much as the basketball. Again, it's not sharp - if anything, the focus seems to be on the tree behind your son rather than anywhere else - but all the important bits are blurry.

 

[MMuddler]

mistastixx wrote:

Hi mistastixx! Good to see you posting here with pix of your son. I know that much of the drive to shoot sports revolves around our kids. My older son feels left out since he grew up before digital and my little guy (and his teammates) have been covered in thousand of digital pictures.

So.... first picture is the type of shot that doesn't capture sport but captures the person of interest. I am a little unsure about the cropping..... and whether his gaze offstage left means the horizontal format is meant to give space out to the left and leave you to wonder what he's looking at .... or whether an 8x10 aspect ratio or even square would let you give up on that and just settle in on your son. Highlites look just a little burnt out.

Shot on its arc to the basket. I like sports images that capture the shooter and his/her target as well as the projectile on its way. Hard to position yourself to capture these... and also eliminate confusing background. I can live with the angled horizon and even recognize that it may be more than simply accepting how the shot may have been taken viz. it was a discretionary adjustment on your part that lets you keep the upward motion of shooter and arcing ball in a vertical frame.... more effective perhaps than what you'd have if you had cropped horizontally. Matter of taste, just as in my cropping comment on the first image. Maybe I'm reading more into this than what there is. I'd suggest wider aperture to get rid of sharp background but you are already shooting from a crouch and have improved the background that way. With 28mm more aperture isn't going to help much and physical space possibly doesn't allow for backing away and shooting with a longer lens. Maybe open up the shadows a little .... if you can do that selectively on just the player it would make a nice difference.

--
Marabou Muddler
http://mmuddler.smugmug.com/Sports