Show jumping - intense rider and posing horse

[buzzrk]

From Close to home

I used this for my class as example of freezing motion.
I processed and printed in B&W and I think it looks better in B&W.

How I took it:
Handheld
Cropping and levels, curves adjustment in Photoshop.

EXIF: (full exif available on Picasa)
Canon T2i 55-250mm
F5.6 1/4000 @ISO400 RAW


Questions:
What do you think about overall exposure and technique?

I see the background is busy. What can I do in photoshop to bring viewer's attention to rider and the horse.

[Doug Sundseth]

Exposure is reasonable and the motion is frozen nicely. I don't think you need to worry much about either.

But your composition has problems here.

As you noted, your background is both busy and bright. Specifically, the helmet of the rider merges with the underside of the roof of the stands, the foreleg of the horse merges with the support post, and the "horizon" line goes right through the horse's head.

I would crop in much more tightly on the horse and rider to get rid of as many distractions as I could easily. You could also vignette the photo after the crop to further focus the viewer's attention. You could even hand blur the background to simulate shallow DoF if you wanted to spend quite a bit of time and effort. Finally, if you were to drop the brightness of the blues and greens in the photo, you might get a better contrast between subject and background.