Can't decide

I tried a little something different Friday night. I can't decide if I like the effect or not. How about you?

different approach

Not sure I like the effect or not, the fact that both players are cut of at the knees makes the shot not work for me. Would like to see a full frame action with the blured motion effect to see if that works or not.

Pete

At that range to include the feet would cut off the QBs head and there would most likely be motion blur in 21s feet as well which would take away from the QBs motion. The hand off is centered so feet aren't important in this shot, well at least not to me.
I guess I could have backed it off to maybe 135 or 150 and got all the feet in but, I would rather have it a little tighter than a loose shot with feet. In fact I could crop it some to make it even tighter but, it was just an experiment.
Thanks for the response tho.

It did capture what I was looking for tho, lots of motion blur in one player and very little if any in the other. It is pretty hard to do in camera and this was only the second time I tried it this year. Last time there was way too many players in it.

I can understand the concept behind this but ....

All my instinct tells me that the foreground player should be in sharp focus. I know you did this deliberately, but it still does not feel right to me.

It is not so much that he is not the focal point of the shot, or that the blur does not impart a feeling of motion to him, but perhaps due to the fact that I am used to having the primary subject in focus. My impression from a first look at this is that you did not focus on your intended subject and I know from reading your post that you did indeed focus on what you wanted and that the blur is intentional.

Whatever it is, this effect does not work for me.

Perhaps if you could get a little less blur?

I can appreciate how difficult it must be to try and get a capture such as this. Would you explain what your concept was and what you were trying to impart to this?

I do enjoy your other sports photographs especially the auto racing ones.

Thanks for sharing.

I believe the focus was on the running back, lol I slept since then tho. The primary point of focus, well that depends on who your looking at. The RB has the ball, the QB is no longer part of the play. Damn I wish I could have done this on a play running left instead of right so I could have gotten the faces in it.

The concept is simple, show motion in one player while freezing action in the other. I think I did this a couple of times last year but, between backgrounds, additional players, refs, UFO's whatever the case was, none turned out as well as this one did.
I have had about 6 emails from players and parents who think it was really cool, so to that effect, it worked. So far the two players featured must have not seen it yet.

It was done, ISO 1000 - 5.6 - 1/100
1/80 was too slow and too much was blurred, 1/125 didn't show enough motion. From a technical standpoint, this about a 9.5 on the hard as hell scale. I can see it will take a lot of practice and a whole lot more luck to get it better but, I am semi-happy with the result.

Thanks for the compliment about the racing shots eastcoast909. I was kind of hoping maybe someone would have done something similar to this but, I guess not.

Ok, I can see it now. I don't know the numbering very well for players and did not notice the ball in his hands.

This comes up as a small image on my screen so it is difficult to make out details. I assumed that number 21 was blocking for the QB, need to get the ball in plain view.. LOL

Second opinion... It's growing on me. I really like the idea and appreciate the difficulty in trying to achieve it.

Keem em coming!

Well 21 does have the ball, you just can't see it. I wish it would have been a play that ran left instead of right then I would have had some good faces in it. It does have a tendency to grow on you. I am thinking it may easier to reproduce in PS than in camera lol.
Give it a try eastcoast if you have a chance to shoot some football yet this year. A tip tho, watch the backgrounds. That is why this one worked as well as it did because the background was pretty much neutral, not much to move around and mess things up.
Let me know if you try it and what you come up with.