It is tough picture to get right - very dark, lots of movement - and you caught the dancer in a perfect spot of the leap. So thats good.
However it is quite soft - what was the camera shutter and ISO. If you have more room on the ISO I would use it. I presume a flash is not possible on this shot - if you can you should consider using a flash
It would be better to leave more space in front than behind to leave her room to jump into. This is easy to create because the back is all black and you could clone it.
The surface she is jumping on is tilted and only a thin sliver - I would remove it or clone some more of it and untilt it.
MrJoe,
Nice capture. I shoot my daughter's dance, so I know that this is not an easy thing to shoot. Low light, fast action. This is the stuff DSLR's and fast lenses were made for!
Mind sharing more details (camera, lens, EXIF)? I think you will get more helpful feedback with this information.
Perhaps a little noise reduction, sharpening and reduction of the magenta might improve it. You could also pull back the brightness on the face and arms - but a very nice capture
This was shoot witha 40D, 200-400mm 2.8, ISO 3200,1/750 @ f/4 focal lenght of 217mm Exposure mode auto very low lighting..Please let me know what I made need to work on..
I think your settings were as good as it gets - wide open with highest ISO. So your technique is solid.
Other things you could do if you are not already doing are to manually focus and set it on multiframe and take a burst. Manual focus lets you take pictures faster in the dark because the lens is not seeking focus. Burst sometimes captures moments in more in focus. But in this case, You did very well given the light challenge, so I am not sure what you can do aside from buying a more light sensitive lens.
I think the technique you're using is spot on. The only thing I'm thinking here, is that it might be a bit overexposed. If you shot in RAW, I'd tone down the exposure just a little bit, but other than that, you caught the moment of peak action! If you could get to 1/1000, it might have helped stop some of the motion blur. Recently, while shooting around ISO1600 I was able to get 1/500 and 1/750 for shooting eagles, but found that getting 1/1000 produced much better results.
