First tennis pictures

Leblanc

Hi,

I went to the Rogers cup in Montreal a few weeks ago and took some pictures. Below are my 3 favorites.

They are also available in this gallery: http://skywalker7100.smugmug.com/My-2014-Photo-Project/

Comments are welcome, thank you for looking!

jhefti

I'm hardly an expert in shooting tennis; in fact, I just shot my first pro game a few weeks ago (Bank of the West Classic at Stanford), but I will pass along what I learned from this experience.

1. Tennis is a game that lends itself to stereotypical shots of volleys and serves. Although interesting, these types of shots are so common that they can get boring. The opportunities to grab really interesting shots are relatively rare and require practice and anticipation to get them. I'm very much still working on this.

2. Most of my favorite shots were not taken at court level. In contrast to the mantra that getting a low angle is almost always better, I think my best shots were taken from the stands and behind the baseline. Part of this is because tennis tends to have very cluttered backgrounds that are close to the players. However, when I shot from above and behind I could keep the frame limited to just the player and the court, which is cleaner.

As an example of this, here's a shot from behind the baseline that captures a fairly uncommon moment between serves and volleys.



These were also taken from the stands above:





About the only courtside shots I liked were these, and even then the background is distracting:





The other images are here if you're interested: http://www.johnhefti.com/p372160219

Leblanc

I agree with #1 below. I just spent a few hours at the court and felt like I already knew a lot about shooting tennis.

Nice pictures by the way!

jhefti wrote: »

I'm hardly an expert in shooting tennis; in fact, I just shot my first pro game a few weeks ago (Bank of the West Classic at Stanford), but I will pass along what I learned from this experience.

1. Tennis is a game that lends itself to stereotypical shots of volleys and serves. Although interesting, these types of shots are so common that they can get boring. The opportunities to grab really interesting shots are relatively rare and require practice and anticipation to get them. I'm very much still working on this.

2. Most of my favorite shots were not taken at court level. In contrast to the mantra that getting a low angle is almost always better, I think my best shots were taken from the stands and behind the baseline. Part of this is because tennis tends to have very cluttered backgrounds that are close to the players. However, when I shot from above and behind I could keep the frame limited to just the player and the court, which is cleaner.

As an example of this, here's a shot from behind the baseline that captures a fairly uncommon moment between serves and volleys.



These were also taken from the stands above:





About the only courtside shots I liked were these, and even then the background is distracting:





The other images are here if you're interested: http://www.johnhefti.com/p372160219