Boys of summer

[mark 66]

Please tell me how i can make this sharper

[windrider86]

Please include your camera settings so we have something to go on. Thanks

[shruggy63]

The action looks to be frozen nicely looking at the spray of sand so it must be slight camera shake? I know I have to force myself to consciously remember to grip the camera more firmly quite often! Using a tripod would help but it's not ideal for sport photography; maybe a dual tripod/monopod? They can be bought quite cheap.
The framing is off, the guy on the right is very distracting. I'm thinking that in a classic sports image the foot in the sand & the battle within a battle between the players is all important so I'd work on depth of field to capture only that crisply & leave the rest of the field out of focus.

[mark 66]

I am using a nikon D90....lens.nikon 80-200..ISO 400...F\5.6

[Doug Sundseth]

Without the shutter speed and focal length (the one you used rather than the range of the lens), it's difficult to be sure, but it looks to me like the base and the sand at the base are in focus but motion blurred. The players look to be out of the sharp depth of field of the lens, though they might be motion-blurred as well.

I'm going to guess that you were at 200mm and perhaps 50 ft. away from the action. At that distance, your depth of field only extends 2.22 feet behind the point of focus . If you were closer, the DoF is much shallower than that.

Recommendations: You probably want to be at around 1/1000 second to freeze action and you want your DoF to cover the whole scene. (Basic recommendations; artistic decisions may change any of that). I'd probably start at 1/1000 and f/8 and push the ISO to get the exposure right, then vary from there. You'll likely get some noise, but when the tradeoff is between noise and sharpness, I'll take noise nearly every time.

[flytyer57]

To my eye, the action in this photo is quite sharp. If you wanted the glove sharper, you would have needed a faster shutter speed since it is moving a bit faster than anything else in the rest of the photo. As for the guy standing on the side and the player in the background, a smaller aperture like f/16 would have helped.