Since I've been asking questions you've been giving me help and advice, I thought I'd also share (what little I now know). Enclosed is a recent photo I took at a soccer match. I would say I had a good sharp shot to work with which I definitely find to be helpful. For this photo, I adjusted levels, used high pass filter and burned (40%)selected parts of the photo.

As mentioned in the past, I am trying to learn different techniques to obtain different looks depending on the photo and my feeling for the photo. Please share your own creation ...sky

The compression artifacts make it hard to comment entirely on the image.
The look is very stylised and I dont think the vignette suits either football or this stylised look.
Other than that - it looks OK... from what I can see through the artifacts ;)

hi skydog,

i like this shot. it shows action. his foot is raised, the ball is off the ground, grass is flying around...it has motion. i also like the expression on his face. that emphasizes the effort and concentration.

i kind of like the vingette (though making it a bit more subtle or with more of a gradient might have been better) but what it does is move this over from a 'sports photography' to art and that changes things. for instance, the high pass. i'm assuming you used 'high pass' and not 'high pass sharpen'. if i zoom out to about 40% zoom, the high pass works fine, but when i zoom in to 100% it looks just a tiny bit overdone. this is most evident on his hair, but also shows around the borders of the objects. it also makes the grass a bit odd looking as well. so, you might want to either tone the high pass down or use it selectively.

i do like the contrast. you've really set him out there and blurred the background nicely, so the image has some pop. that's good.

you might also try a different crop. i'm attaching an example of one possibility. (this would look better before the vignetting but i dont have the original)

craig

craig,

thanks for feed back I definitely like your feedback on the position and the vingette. The customer liked the vingette, so I went with it. My direction and goal is to create an "art" look to the sports shots I take. That's why I enjoy this site so much.

Most of my shooting occurs under the lights...in poorly lit fields. I use 2.8 L lens and shoot at 1600 and 3200 ISO. I use Ninja for the noise, but I often lose the color. I'm sure I'll be back in the Fall with examples to seek some guidance on what can be improved upon.

Craig...enclosed original

skydog,

you're welcome. and thanks for posting the original.

iso... it's been a while. that's the same as asa, yes? and do the iso numbers match up the same way? is an iso 400 the same as an asa 400? and if they do, then shooting at 1600 and 3200 is more than i ever did. with my old film camera i think the fastest film speed i ever used was 800 on black and white film.

what camera are you using? i'm assuming from the look that it's digital and this also partially explains the somewhat odd look to the grass i mentioned.

and one other comment i didnt make in the original post was that your retouch gave the image a somewhat 'trading card' look. i dont know if that's good or bad but it's just something i noticed in passing :)

craig