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The crops are much too tight I think.

better then tv...not so noisy

hamster wrote:The crops are much too tight I think.

These pics were taken about a year ago and at the time i only had a fixed 200mm zoom lens,but i think the tight cropping was effective in showing the strain and the muscle tension in the pics.But thanks for the advice,im still learning,so any comments (good or bad) are appreciated.

timno1 wrote:

hamster wrote:The crops are much too tight I think.

These pics were taken about a year ago and at the time i only had a fixed 200mm zoom lens,but i think the tight cropping was effective in showing the strain and the muscle tension in the pics.But thanks for the advice,im still learning,so any comments (good or bad) are appreciated.

Hi Timno,

I disagree about the tight crops. The crops in #2 and #3 work for me.
There are many types of images in tennis. You probably want to be able to do all of them.

You have the classic serving shots that get the entire player in frame, with the stretched arms as well.
Then you have the player stretching going for the shot. That works well also, particularly if you can include the ball at the extremity of the stretch.
Then you have what you've doing in #2 and #3. In some of my work I've cropped even closer. My favourite being a head and shoulders shot from the side and slightly behind of a player serving. You see tremendous muscle definition and the side of her face. Breaks the rules but it worked for me.

The other thing is to watch the light and work out the best place to get the shots from. Like much photography, the light will be most pleasant late afternoon, but you need to balance this against getting long shadows across your images. Those darn eye shades they wear are a pain as they keep the face in shadows during the middle of the day.

My advice is to keep playing around with all the different types of shots. But don't be afraid to get in close. You can get some tremendous emotion in tight head crops.


Cheers
John

I see the strain and muscle tension and that's great that you managed to capture it, but IMO I would have just liked to see some more interaction between the ball and the player as well as the muscle defintion.

Picture 2 perhaps could have been better if you had composed it up and left? More of the racket and arm (the fixed length may not let you get the ball in). And my problem with three is more the loss of most of the limbs...it just looks strange.