Run like the wind

Canon EOS T3i, 1/25", f/5.6, ISO 800, 18-55mm II @55mm

This was a lucky shot. I was in AF-Servo focusing and single shot mode (not continuous in which I should've been). I panned the camera at the speed his was moving. Because the boy wasn't running too fast I was able to keep up with him. His face isn't tack sharp but focus is fairly good.

The original image didn't have that much motion blur in the background. As you can see the background is very cluttered and that nearly drowns the subject. So blurring the background was imperative. And to boot increasing the motion blur would accentuate the boy's apparent speed.

So in one layer I masked out the boy with the ball, cloned in the adjacent pixels to fill the empty space, and then applied the motion blur filter. I had another layer with everything masked out except the boy--the very inverse of the previous layer's mask. I applied a 10 pixel feathering to the mask so that there wouldn't be a sharp jagged transition between him and the background. I then duplicated that layer of the boy, applied a high pass filter to it, desaturated the result and then changed the blend mode to overlay. This technique is used to increase the sharpness of the image.