2011 Fashion

gael monfils

sports photography is hard.

i spend the afternoon at the us open--there was competition in the form of qualifying rounds, but mostly i stuck to the courts where the "qualifed" were practicing. it was quite a lesson for me to try to figure out the settings...afternoon sun was bright, casting long deep shadows, and then clouds would drift across and change everything. it kept a wrinkle in my forehead.
but oh, the joy in my heart.

my focus was pretty limited during these sessions, trained on a specific player, but i wasn't really missing much in tennis terms--it was practice-- some played sets, but there was always part of session spent on drills, specific shots hit over and over (i stopped taking pictures of people serving). players like monfils and djokovic and tipsarevic seem conscious of trying to make things entertaining for the fans--and the serbs were really spirited in the set they played. people went wild for them. others, like verdasco and murray were disappointingly workmanlike--though i laughed that murray has that same draggy demeanor that he carries in matches. it seemed to me the younger ladies practiced with intensity, seeming to want to prove themselves with every shot.

in the end, there isn't much of a sports story to these, they're mostly "portraits" (i.e. fan shots).

here are few. more to come (and more to take)...