Penalty! Tackling the man off the ballby
BigChrisComment by Bear_Music: *** C R I T I Q U E C L U B C O M M E N T ***
I recall being both charmed and amused by this image in the challenge. I found (and find) it easy to look at and worth closer examination. In that sense it draws me in; I want to "know more" about the sequence of events here. So it's an effective image, and a strong entry; with this many photos shouting for attention, any photo that draws viewers back is a "winner", and your final score of 5.8776 reflects that other viewers kept coming back as well, IMO.
So why didn't this score higher? That's an interesting question, and I have an opinion. I believe that despite its many strong points that engage us, the image has some equally strong flaws. I'm of course aware that this is an action capture and there's nothing you can DO about any of this, but nevertheless if I'm going to be critical of this as an image, here's what doesn't work for me:
1. Least importantly perhaps, but also most fixable; the playing field doesn't seem level. You need maybe 3/4 of a degree of CCW rotation to make it seem so. It may actually BE level for all I know (the background due, who's static, appears to be close to true vertical) but the feet on the leftmost guy, the back of the guy on the ground, and even the angle of the pouncing fellow, all descripe left-to-right diagonals that are skewing our perspective. So try balancing this visually, see if you can get it feeling upright.
2. It doesn't feel quite sharp. Looks like some USM would fix it though, no biggie.
3. There's nothing you can do about this now, of course, but the grouping of the figures, as a compositional element, is relatively weak. The overlap of the leftmost guy witht he BG guy is singularly unfortunate, in how precisely one half of the rearmost figure is occluded and the matching of face aganst face is keeping us from seeing EITHER face well. Hypothetically speaking, imagine the leftmost guy 6 feet closer to the camera (more depth) and the rearmost guy 2 feet further to the right (no overlap, or little overlap).
4. It's VERY strange the lack of readable faces in this action shot, and even MORE strange the lack of a head on the leaping man.
5. On the "faces" topic, upon closer examination the two faces we CAN see, seem to be more amused than anything else. This leads me, at least, to finally deduce that the incident is not occurring during actual play, but is instead a bit of horseplay. When I got that sense out of it (and it speaks well of the picture that I looked hard enough to get that much out of it) I felt a little let down.
6. On a completely irrelevant note, I'm amused that the guy on the ground's sporting red socks, and his teammates have black socks and/or black shin protectors.
So that's it, that's how I react to this one and why. Tell me, WAS it horseplay or an actual fould during game play? I want to stress that it's a very intriguing image with many strong points, and that I gave it a 7 myself, but the above represent areas (mostly not fixable) that separate a perfect capture from a merely good one.
Robt.
Photographer found comment helpful.