Practice Makes Perfectby
meganoComment by dr rick: Greetings from the Critique Club
The action here is great! It catches the proverbial "decisive moment", freezing the action as only a camera can. The simple composition allows people to project their own imagination on it, making the experience personal to every viewer. The memories and emotions it triggers would be very different for a soccer player, a soccer fan, and a ballet dancer!
As others have pointed out, the main problem here is the extreme dynamic range caused by shooting toward the sun. Cameras may freeze action well, but they can't capture both very bright and very dark areas at the same time. And the shadows are so dark here that they obscure the 3-dimensional form. Shooting with the sun behind you would help (although I have no idea what the background would be like in this case).
You can try bringing out some shadow detail here using the Shadows/Highlights tool, although the extremes are so, well, extreme that the result would probably be somewhat unrealistic.
The composition of this photo is weak. The ball is a natural anchor here. It's what the player is looking at, and the focal point of any soccer game. But it's crowded by the left edge. There needs to be a bit more space to the left so the view isn't cut off when the eye is focusing on it.
One more suggestion: Always use the highest quality you can when using the jpeg format. For DPChallenge, you are allowed up to 150K, and you are only using about a third of that here. The "fuzziness" around his head, left hand, and elsewhere is caused by low quality jpeg compression artifacts. They really aren't that noticable here, but do keep this in mind; this can easily ruin otherwise great photos, and it's easily avoided.
Congratulations on a personal high score! This really is a good photo. Voters here tend to over-emphasize technical quality. Keep shooting; practice makes perfect in photography as well as soccer!
Photographer found comment helpful.
