Christian Photographers Community

   Hey guys, How could I have made this shot better?

Well done.  I love your action shots.

Better?  I'm sure I don't know how it could be.   

Not much of sport shooter,  I've heard having a fast lens helps alot, sorry not much to offer in advice,-but I like the capture you got here!!! 

That's a FANTASTIC shot! It tells a story, and captures action, two important things in sports or action photography.

Maybe you could tweak the composition just a tad. When my eye lights on this photography, it takes me a minute to figure out what to look at. There's a lot of story here. The teammates, the defender in back, the sportscaster....but IMO the strongest story is with the girl with the puck. So how to draw the attention to her? So much competes for attention--all those faces, all those expressions. And your camera chose to focus on the girl in back. That can be overcome, but it takes a little postprocessing.

Are you familiar with the rule of thirds? It's an artistic tool that's been around for millennia, and I find it really useful for making photographs interesting. The idea is to divide the photo into three equal parts horizontally, and then three equal parts vertically. It's good to have interesting things going on along the horizontal and vertical lines, but the real point of focus should hit one of the four intersections where the horizontal or vertical lines intersect.

If you crop a bit off the right side, the front girl's mouth hits the intersection and you lose the newscaster's face. You've already got some improvement then, because my eye will go straight to the girl. Then later my eye travels back to the other faces, and they support her story instead of competing with it.

Then (and here's where it get really subjective), I like the story her eyes are telling. Tough, focused. You've got lots of empty ice at the bottom, so you can crop some from there, and bring that upper right intersection right to where her eyes are.

But, like I said, it's already a great picture. It just depends on what you want to do. The competing faces, the way you have it, already tells interesting stories--the fast-paced randomness of the event, for instance. The emotions. The action. You really got a nice capture, there.



I use GIMP, which has an automatic "rule of thirds" tool you can use in cropping. I imagine Photoshop must have something similar.

Sounds like a lot of good information there Whistlinsadler.