All great shots Bill - I've seen many "compositions" just like those printed as large posters. I imaging that you shot them at a fairly high ISO to keep the shutterspeed high? (can see a wee bit of noise). What shutterspeed did you use?
By the way, do you normally upload your images to any of the online hosting sites? (if so, I can help you display them inline here if you'd like).
Exif data is available on all of them, first two at iso400, third one at iso250. The first shot was taken at 8AM and the shadows were really dark, the effective focal length was 450mm. Due to the fact that these are all cropped shots the background artifacts are most likely just blown up bokeh.
Edit, can you suggest a good online hosting site?
Thanks Bill.
I asked the very same question a few weeks ago. I seems that there are quite a few. Flickr.com was suggested - and appears to be one of the biggies. I took a look at them - created an account - but due to my limited experience configuring these types of sites I wasn't able to get it looking the way I like. Sean suggested pbase.com, which I'd previously used a few years ago - I took another look at it - found something that did the job - and have been based there ever since. As with many sites they offer a limited account for free, or a "full service account" for a handful of dollars a year - so I just ran with the latter option.
Couple of "food for thought" things ...
1. It's been brought to my attention that flickr.com don't like you posting images inline that point back to their site, but for those who have done it, it seems to work just fine.
2. Linking back with pbase.com works just fine, but you have to use the supplied link when you click "Edit Image" - if you use the one that's included in the displayed image properties then it only seems to work for the person posting it (probably a security thing). Also, with pbase, the URL always ends in ***medium.jpg - you can easily edit this to ***large.jpg or ***original.jpg to point people to larger versions of your image (the software here displayes them smaller though, unless you tell it otherwise) (I upload my images to pbase.com as 1024 pixels x 512 pixels, and it seems to work pretty well).
I'm sure others will jump in with their recommendations as well. Feel free to have a wonder through my pbase site at pbase.com/cjsouthern if it helps.
Colin,
"1. It's been brought to my attention that flickr.com don't like you posting images inline that point back to their site, but for those who have done it, it seems to work just fine."
This isn't the case. All they ask is that the picture or link, links directly back to flickr. They give more than one option of embedding a picture to another site but for copyright reasons they need the link. If you go to your account and click on a pic, go to all sizes, medium for example and scroll down you'll see what I mean.
So that's the secret of top cricket! Play at silly O'clock! I'm dialling Flinty as we speak!
Ah - thanks Mark, good to know.
Now if we can only figure out why some inline images are failing to load!