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Thanks, guys, for the feedback. I posted two of the images on DPR, and someone actually called them 'soft to the point of being out of focus.' LOL, I was appalled!

On another note...the ball. What do we think about the ball in the last shot? Keep it or let it go? I like the added color to the image, but I could see where some might find it distracting.

James

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James,

Congrats on the moving up to FF. One of these days I'll have to make that jump too. I always love getting to know a new piece of technology.

I'm not surprised that you got called for soft images on DPR if you posted at this same resolution. Anyone pixel peeping at web resolutions can't really be serious. I'm sure if you posted one of those 60 Mb monsters (if you could upload a file that big) there wouldn't be any comments about softness.

Now about the ball. I think the red color is a good counterpoint to the black and white. However, I do have a couple of problems with it, since you asked. There was something that was catching my eye with the ball and I realized it was the flash catch reflections. It was acting just like an eye catch light and drawing my eye away from the face. The other thing was the composition. I got a real sense of unbalance to the right side. The ball is pretty heavy visually and the added black space made the image too heavy on the right side for me.

But to tell you the truth, my biggest distraction was that OOF rear foot on the left side. With the black on black of the leg, the free floating rear foot kind of looks like some kind of little critter back there.

Anyway, FWIW, if it were mine, I would have done it something like this. I also tried to clean up all the light reflections in the eyes a little and reduce them down to just a single catch light in each eye.

Geo