I have never photographed tennis before.
The actual setup of the courts created significant challenges and ones that I really wasn’t used to from soccer, football, field hockey, or even baseball (which does have plenty of fences).
All the fences were very tall and many of them had the netting covering most of the surface. That was compounded by the courts being on some steep hills so one side of the court had about two feet of room before a steep drop off and the other had about two feet before a really steep incline but one that wasn’t tall enough to get you over the fence. I had hoped a topographic map would show what I meant but it didn’t. The actual tennis net is also kind of an obstacle and kind of a feature.1
There were two groups of courts. One set of 3 up high and another set of 3 down low. From the high side, I could shoot over the tall fence for the middle court on the low side. That is where the best light was, especially for the second matches.2
The bottom line is that many of the choices I had were limited by physical obstacles, what court the people happened to be on, and the sun. Sounds like I’m setting up a lot of excuses early on, right? Also, I imagine people really love a description of the environmental challenges in photography. It’s like the long stories prior to recipes. Alas. I cannot help myself. As a recent commenter (pandasarenice4917) on my YouTube video entitled “LaTeX collaborative real(ish) time editing in WordPress” said “A video with 1 view on my recommendations? Sign me up” I fear I will never reach algorithmic audience optimization at this rate.
This shot shows some of netting. The green material led to some interesting effects. I was tempted to photoshop out the holes but have resisted so far. You can see the light here was pretty harsh.
A decent candid shot where they were laughing at the coach’s choice of words to cheer on one of the players.
This worked decently.
A decent candid but no real tie to tennis.
One of the goals was to capture the seniors. These two were senior managers for the tennis team. Here they are managing.
The distortion of the electronic shutter is really apparent here and that’s at 1/1600.
Decent side view. No action. Tennis racket is at least visible.
You can see how high I am to shoot over the fence like this but it pretty much only worked for the lower center court.
Semi-decent action shot. Crooked net.
I tried to get some layered shots but it just wasn’t happening. Getting the ball, another player, and the player I wanted in the same shot is going to require quite a bit of practice/experience.
Is the net a feature or a bug?
No net. That good center court lighting later in the day.
