Baseball Pictures

Here are some pictures of my favorite player. Any suggestions for improving future pictures?
I've only cropped the pictures.

Crop tighter.

Better?

Can't get much tighter than this.

Shorthairs wrote in post #16842359
Better?

Yes, that is very nice and gets rid of all the distracting stuff in the background.

The first image in your original post is hard to deal with because of the position of the ball.

The first crop you did is a bit too tight. I like to use standard crop dimension of 4 x 6 or 8 x 10. Remember some simple graphic rules like the rules of thirds and leading, trailing space. On the first one, I would have left a bit more room on left to give more of a sense of where the ball came from. In the second crop, you don't want to be so tight to the ball unless that is the only option. Your original in that case was probably fine.

As you improve on your timing you can get the ball closer than in #1 and get a perfect crop. Also not sure what camera you are using but a higher frames per second (if you can go there) would give you more options of frames to select from.

Jim, looking at your flickr page I found the originals of these shots. Looks like you were using that 24-70 you picked up and you were on the wide end with these at f7.1 in TV mode and these are huge crops (which says a lot for the sharpness and clarity of that lens!).
I would say leave the 24-70 for dugout shots and after the game candid moments. Use that beautiful new 70-200 II and stay closer to the 200 range so you don't have to crop so much in post.
I would suggest (maybe others will differ in opinion here) that you shoot as close to wide open as you can so you get better isolation on your subject and less of the background clutter will be in focus. I use Manual mode with an aperture of f2.8 most of the time on the 70-200 and a fixed shutterspeed to whatever I can get away with depending upon light and use Auto ISO as the camera's variable.
And I might add that whatever advise Mr. Stewart gives, you follow to a "T"! His baseball action shots are superb every time!

Shorthairs,

You are getting good advice in the last two posts. Listen to those guys because they know more about it than me.

JVthePT wrote in post #16845777
...
And I might add that whatever advise Mr. Stewart gives, you follow to a "T"! His baseball action shots are superb every time!...

Wow! Thanks JV! Appreciate it. And FYI, they are that way thanks largely in part to comments and critique I have received over the years on this site. Glad to be of assistance to those newer than me!

Thanks everyone.
John - My buddy was using my 70-200 so the 24-70 was what I was using at that time. We have another Canon guy now as he loved taking pictures that day.
We still need to get together for a day of shooting.