# In a dry spell, need to start improving again.



## Gobeshockey (Mar 14, 2017)

Long story short I am stuck in that place where you haven't seen improvements in your own photos. Friends, fans, family members all say they're great but your like um no. So, I'm posting photos from past games through out the season & I would love to hear all suggestion to work on and how to do so.


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## Designer (Mar 15, 2017)

Gobeshockey said:


> I would love to hear all suggestion to work on and how to do so.


I'm not a sports photographer, but with any luck one ore more of our members who do that will stop by for a look.  I think you've got some good shots here, and some that might have been better.

I see that there is a struggle between getting the action and getting faces at the same time.  The ones that are tilted should be straightened.  If you frame wide in the arena, then you can straighten and crop later on your computer.  Try to get faces if you can.  Crop out extra stuff.


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## jcdeboever (Mar 15, 2017)

Some great shots in there. I'm not a professional but I do see a lot of tilted shots. I would try to practice leveling shots with the board rail. It's a little thing that would dramatically improve an image, imo. I shoot a fair amount of film and it has helped me slow down enough to consider this when framing and it has transferred the discipline to digital. Very helpful for street shooting. Not saying you should shoot film, just saying it was a bad habit I had to break to improve.


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## BillM (Mar 15, 2017)

As already mentioned, straighten and crop. Use that to draw the viewer's eye to what you want them to see. There are way too many to comment on all but for the first just get the post upright and bring up the shadows just a little and it's a real nice shot. For number 2 I see where you were going but there just isn't anything there to hold interest. Same with 3 and 4, but crop in on 5 and you have a nice moment. Just my 2 cents, i'm not a professional. Hope that helps.


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## Derrel (Mar 15, 2017)

As mentioned, maybe shoot a little looser, and crop in later. I think some of these show too much noise reduction, which lowers the feeling of seeing reality, of being there, so I'd consider less aggressive NR. I prefer to see the high-frequency, small detail that makes things look REAL, rather than a smoothed image. Keep the camera more level if possible.

I pulled a few of these onto the desktop and opened them; these are scaled a bit too large to down-rezz in my browser; a coupl;e of the images I looked at looked like missed focus when seen in this window, but when opened up and seen full-sized looked sharp, so if you DO show these on-line, consider scaling them down to a smaller size, like say 1,200 pixels on the long axis.

As far as getting better: hills and plateaus, hills and plateaus! You probably just need to shoot more, and for a longer time frame, and then you'll climb another hill. These mostly look "okay", but not great, not spectacular. There ae a number of shots that need to be cropped a bit, to eliminate unused space, or to better balance the image.

Gonna suggest being very aware of framing and 1) tall vs horizontal camera orientation, and of using the lens at say, 2)150mm and of following the action more so than zooming and reframing all the time 3)keeping the camera level. I think keeping the lens "mostly" the one focal length, a bit shorter than maximum, will help on multiple fronts: framing, leveling, and timing of action and following the game and being READY when something happens.


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## Gobeshockey (Mar 15, 2017)

Thanks for the advice & help. Just redoing a few editing with some suggestions made does improve them. That's a start & you've got to start somewhwere.


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## BillM (Mar 17, 2017)

These two are really nice !!!!!


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