[Recovered Thread: 120799]

[Trojansoc]

Spring break...ah! Great time to head to the tennis courts with some of my high school players for next fall (I coach soccer in spring, tennis in fall.)....but alas...the rain gods have struck. It gave me an opportunity, though, to go through and organize the tennis section of my hard drive. Came on a couple of interesting shots from a city-wide beginners' clinic. Shot with an Olympus C-750.

[Trojansoc]

Being on the court as an instructor gave some great opportunities for shooting angles....but with 50 or so beginners hacking away, it also offered plenty of surprises to the back of the head, lol.

[JohnG]

I like the the concept of the first shot very much - very nice framing. But a qeustion for you - did you crop this quite a bit? The reason I ask is there seems to be a loss of edge detail in her hair (left side) and her arm and there seems to be a little too much noise in the face. The noise can be easily cleaned up with judicious noise removal (don't want to use too much as detail is already an issue). Of the two issues, the loss of detail is the more troublesome - it keeps the girl from popping out from the background. Since, as I recall, you upgraded your camera - this detail issue shouldn't be as much of a problem anymore.

Second shot is ruined for me by the background - the car and woman are too much of a distraction. In situations like this you're better off just shooting one end of the court - the grass hill in the first shot makes for a much less distracting background. It's a sad fact of sports photography but as a sportsshooter you have to keep backgrounds in mind - and with a sport like tennis it's going to be very difficult to blur those annoying backgrounds so the best approach is to shoot the players when they're on the far end away from the spectators and parking lot.

[Trojansoc]

John,

Thanks for your comments. Photo #1 was not really heavily cropped, except to remove what was essentially empty court to the right of the little girl (original orientation was horizontal). She essentially filled the left half of the shot. I suspect some of the problem may have come from overprocessing, particularly to remove shadows on the right side of the face. An added factor may have been working with too many generations of editing.

I went back to the original and re-edited with PSP 10, backing off on the settings, particularly on shadows. I used a little USM and ran one pass with the embedded noise reduction filter in PSP. See what you think.

I agree with the distracting background in Photo #2. (I found the net also highly distracting.) I went ahead and went with it because of the expression and the effort shown in the body language.

[TCav]

This comment is not specific to your shots, but it seems to me that shots like these should be taken at a slower shutter speed. That way, the ball would have some motion blur, instead of looking like it's just hanging there, waiting to be hit (or kicked, or caught.)

My $1/50.

[JohnG]

Trojansoc wrote:

I went back to the original and re-edited with PSP 10, backing off on the settings, particularly on shadows. I used a little USM and ran one pass with the embedded noise reduction filter in PSP. See what you think.

Much better IMO. It's a good example of why keeping digital 'negatives' is a good practice.