Beach Volleyball

Some shots taken while playing king of the hill this weekend.

1.

50 views, and no critiques?

Don't be shy, I won't be offended!

i like it! (#2)
but it could of been better if u could of had all of his body in the pic

Having tried Volleyball a couple of times, I know it can be tough. I like both of your shots however, if I had to choose one it would be #2. Personally, I disagree about being better by having the whole body in the shot because then that would have required the subject to be smaller in the frame therefore you would lose some of the detail in his expression...IMO I like seeing the expressions and in the particular case his knees and below would not add anything....to each their own I guess
The only thing I wonder is if the picture would have been a little sharper with a little faster shutter speed? The ball looks a little blurry since I assume it was after his "dig" so that ball would have been moving pretty fast....nonetheless, nice good!

I've been going back and forth on how much to stop the action. My first few tries had the shutter at around 1/1000 or faster, but sometimes it seemed a bit fake with the ball perfectly frozen. As a result, I've been trying to freeze the person as much as possible, but leaving the ball and maybe the swinging arm with a bit of motion blur to imply speed.

I like both of the shots as I fing them a bit CRISP...Good job capturing the action!

I see you're shooting at ISO 800 with your XTI...I have one too and I'm a noob at all of this...I notice I get a lot of noise and yours is SHARP...

In PP where do you use your Noise Reduction software...I'm really impressed and I think I wanna give ISO 800 another try....I have the XTi with a 70-200mm f/4 IS + 1.4x/TC....

I hope you don't mind the question...

I'll admit also that shooting volleyball is pretty tough -- hard enough to follow the action as a spectator, even harder I would imagine looking through a viewfinder.

I agree with another poster that the second pic would've been great had the player not get cut -off. Great expression on his partner though -- looks almost staged?

alphonsis, good effort on your part as volleyball is very hard to shoot. But at least with beach it's a bit easier as there are only 2 guys on each side and you kinda know who the ball will go to hehe

If you like shooting beach volleyball, try to make it to the SF AVP open in Sept. If you're there on Friday you can shoot courtside on all matches. Even on weekends, as long as it's not the main court, you can stand on the side and shoot all you want on the outside courts.

Volleyball is very difficult. I like them both.

I would've tightened the crop on #2 a little.