Tennis anyone? critique

Last night we played tennis and this is one that I liked. At first we were taking some action shots and I kept the same settings for the whole evening. Please let me know what you think.

I used a Canon T1i
Shutter: 1/100
Exposure: Manual
F stop: f/3.5
ISO: 3200
Focal length: 18mm
Flash:yes

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Overexposed on the ball and really unflattering shadows. The concept it okay, but needs to work on execution.

Sorry, nothing is cohesive on this one.

bad lighting overexposed OOF bad composition

The others already told you it is not a very good shot.
You cannot do this with an on camera flash. The light got to be coming in from the side. And you have to make sure that the ball and the whole of the girl is within the DOF. At a shooting distance of 1.5M your DOF starts at 0.87 M and is only 46 cm wide. That is not enough. So you'll have to pick a smaller aperture, like F8. Then you have a DOF of 1.33 M starting at 0.7M. That shoul do the trick. You can let the back fence fade out of focus.
Try again!

Everyone thanks for your thoughts. It will definately help me. I taken another look at the photo and I see exactly what you mean by the lighting and background.
As for the focus, I purposely wanted the ball out of focus, by using a smaller aperture could I still achive the same effect?

Thanks!!

She looks a little serious.. I feel like she is telling me off with a tennis ball. -- "It wasn't me!"

unnatural
2c

vk2gwk wrote in post #9591439
The others already told you it is not a very good shot.
You cannot do this with an on camera flash. The light got to be coming in from the side. And you have to make sure that the ball and the whole of the girl is within the DOF. At a shooting distance of 1.5M your DOF starts at 0.87 M and is only 46 cm wide. That is not enough. So you'll have to pick a smaller aperture, like F8. Then you have a DOF of 1.33 M starting at 0.7M. That shoul do the trick. You can let the back fence fade out of focus.
Try again!

This is really great feedback...I'm thanking you myself as I just learned something!

I think I'd also like to see both of her eyes, but that might just be my own personal preference.

Keep at it, I dig the concept.