First time sports shooter (SOOC, C&C at your will!)

Hey all --

So this past weekend, I had a chance to bring my shiny new 60D and 70-200 F/4L (someday they wont be shiny or new, I swearz!) to historic Fenway Park to catch one of the Sox's few winning games thus far this season.

Obviously, I'm not a professional, so I consider myself a hobbyist (or even perhaps just a GWC ).. that being said, I do like to do things well, so here's my first attempt at sports photography.

While it was a dreary day to start as we got there, as soon as we got to our seats and as soon as the '1st pitch' ceremony rolled around, the skies seemed to open up -- luckily, in the good way!

I actually ended up taking close to 300 pics, and kept ~233 of them. Normally, I go through and clean everything up exactly the way I want it, but this time around there were so many that I felt were at least OK that I just did a batch process on the raws, got them to a more manageable size and tossed them up on Smugmug (a bunch of people were asking to see them so I figured it was the easiest thing to do in this case). I'm sure I will actually process a few (in fact, I might process a decent number out of the set, take down the ones currently up there and replace them with the processed images, as I've found it fun to process stuff).

I'd really like C&C on the following two (again, these are SOOC, and I know that the batch process messed with a couple of the colors). Feel free to peruse the set(I used the scoreboard pics as ways to remind me of where I was during the game). Also, the use of the copyright is simply to indicate that I took the photo and to prevent people from taking them and trying to capitalize on them, even though I know at least one of the following could easily be cropped and used. These are only resized and have my watermark added. Thanks!

Great shots - I particularly like the tense feeling in #1. The framing almost makes it seem as if the crowd is watching as intently as the players - all leaning forward in their seats.

Does #2 need a bit more saturation?

Neither picture has been retouched or edited (yet) but yeah the 2nd one is definitely due for some work

I took a quick look at your series on smugmug, and my only critique, considering this is your first time sports shooting, is the type of action you took photos of. MOST of your photos are of the pitcher or batter. I would consider those to be my "safety-shots" when photographing baseball. The money shot is always of a fielder diving/fielding for a ball, or a runner sliding into a base. Those are much more difficult to shoot, and take a lot of patience. It involves prefocusing on the shortstop (for example) and just waiting and hoping the ball will be hit to him. For a game, I'll take a series of maybe 5-6 photos per starting pitcher, and maybe shoot a few batters over the course of the game. Most of my time is spent prefocused on the shortstop or 2nd baseman. (Pedroia is definitely my favorite to watch.)

For being in the crowd, at such distance, its difficult to get "frame-worthy" shots because you'd really have to do some considerable cropping...

That all being said, the two photos you posted on this thread are exposed nicely, and the colors look good. Cropping is way to wide (as you mentioned no PP was done), and the faces of the players aren't very visible. Faces are extremely important for a sports photo.

I wish I had time to go to fenway.. lucky guy!

Thanks for the critique - I won't mention that the seats were comped

I've cropped the 1st one down and done a bit of retouching in PSE9 (no LR3 for me yet, maybe after the wedding in ... gah, 5 weeks!?)