I'll have to put up the original later, but this is the second iteration of the shot. The first one I tried showed his partner standing there on the left looking up at him in bright, multi-patterned, blue shorts. I know a lot of people are going to comment that I cut off his right ankle, but in order to get his partner out of the image, it had to be done. The image isn't saturated either - it was probably less than an hour before dusk. The sun/clouds that evening were really giving off some color.
I cloned out two shadows - one above his left knee, and the other in the bottom right corner which was cast from my shoulder. I'm not too happy about the jpg compression. It left some reddish tint on his shorts that wasn't there prior. I also burned his shadow just a tad to help make it stand out.
And yes, even though the title is of a volleyball nature, there is no "volleyball" in the shot...sort of. A shadow of the ball exists with his right hand. You can tell by looking closely that there is definitely something round attached to his hand shadow.
All in all, this was a tough shot to get while also getting all of the factors close to being right too. If I had to do it over again, I would probably move the the aperture to f/8 or f/11. At f/5.6, it wasn't quite sharp enough at the close range I was to him(6-7 feet). My ideal image would have included both feet with nothing else except his shadow. I wasn't about to have them "fake" it for me. The guy pictured in the shot is Jon M. He is one of the MSU men's volleyball players. His partner is also a MSU player(the other Jon). I scrimmage against them on occasion during the winter months indoors and sometimes in the summer when I get the urge to hit the hardcourt. Otherwise, they come out to our sand courts every so often during the warm months.
_________________________________
The "muddy" looking sand is just that. It rains quite a bit here during the spring months and you can tell by looking just beyond the orange court line that the sand is compacted down and wet looking. The orange line may be distracting, but it is definitely part of the game. I wasn't about to clone that out to make it a cleaner looking shot.
Statistics
Place: 28 out of 123 Avg (all users): 5.9157 Avg (commenters): 6.1667 Avg (participants): 5.7647 Avg (non-participants): 5.9826 Views since voting: 1320 Views during voting: 268 Votes: 166 Comments: 8 Favorites: 0
Cool idea! I like the composition, I don't like the border, the general color tone (seems pretty muddy, no pun intended!), and I would love for it to be sharper. Still worth a 6 in my book.
Add photograph to your favorites
Add photographer to your favorites
Photographer found comment helpful.
