I think you made a good effort but for my taste it is just a bit too blurry on the dog himself. I do like the background blur in this.

I agree with tigger3 that the blur on the dog is too much. It's too bad, because otherwise the blurred bacground with an in focus and sharp image of the dog would have been great. Great intentions and effort though.

G'day Josh,
You can always expect really divergent images to get a low c-index here on Caedes, it's just in the nature of "who" is doing the voting and "why" they are visiting Caedes at all. I think that in a "normal" kind of shot of a fast moving animal at least the head needs to be clear. I think, using my imagination a bit, that if you pushed this image even further than you have that might make the all over blur more integral to the image's groove. It's almost an abstract now, an evocation of a running dog rather than a "photo" of one. I'm thinking of impressionist paintings and surrealistic paintings, where we can still tell "that is a clock even though it's melting" or "that is a field of wheat even though it's actually only blurry dots" but that very "unnaturalness" is made a benefit, a power, in the image. As it is this image is half way to that kind of quality but not quite far enough for the blurry dog not to be a deficit. Just my thoughts. I thought about it a bit cos I loved watching my dogs run and one of them could run so fast he often looked exactly like this one even to my naked eye. :))

I think it's fine as an artistic concept. Personally, I like it better with a crop from the Right border, halfway to the dogs tail. Then, up from the bottom to just barely above the 3 dark spots. Also a little more sharpening(not much) seems to add a bit more to the dog without visually altering the background.
Decentralizing the dog puts more emphasis/impact on it and increases it's sense of speed.

Thank you guys (and gals) I really just upped this as is because I haven't produced anything really good in the past year and wanted to break the cycle. I'm also doing a drawing class so the gesture thing has been on my mind a lot recently

You know what, I enjoyed this one. It's different, not the usual stuff I see. I commend you for that.