Are you sure?

[madplower4]

My son was looking at the ump on a called strike. I think the call was correct, but I think he felt it might be a little high! I used my 50mm f1.8 to eliminate background, but it still is distracting. I liked the dust off the catchers mitt.
Any thoughts on how to further blur the background for close shots like this?

And I know, "try moving the garbage can out of there" for starters. Other than that?

[madplower4]

And how do you guys get your shots so clear in the forum, by the time I reduce image size and quality, clear shots become grainy like this one. In it's full size, it's very clear and sharp.

[grego]

How close are you? For you to start blurring, you need to generally fill the frame in the viewfinder.

[madplower4]

Probably no more than 15 feet.

[eastcoast909]

At fifteen feet using a 20D and an f-stop of f2.0 you should get a depth of field from 14 to 16 feet ( using this link http://www.dofmaster.com/dofjs.html)

That should give you lots of background blur. Your focus has to be bang on or you will loose sharpness in you intended subject though.

[Volatile]

What program are you using to resize? Try another one.... And you can get a high quality 800X600 jpg smaller than 250KB, so don't downsize too much.

Also try a larger aperture and tighter framing to remove the background. Sometimes you can't avoid it though. I'll post some shots from this season when I get onto my other computer.

I think the pitch was probably high as it crossed the plate, and your son was right. How old is he? My 10-year-old plays ball out here...