Pacific Life Open
Last week, I had the pleasure of making the trip out to Indian Wells, California to cover the Pacific Life Open. The Pacific Life Open is the largest tennis tournament in the world outside of the four majors (Wimbledon, US, Australian, and French), drawing over 300,000 fans to the southern California desert every year. And why not? As an ATP (men's tennis) master's series event, and a WTA (women's tennis) Tier I event, all the biggest names in tennis like Roger Federer or Maria Sharapova converge on this beautiful desert resort area.
But Jerry, you never cover tennis... why were you down there? Well, a couple reasons. First off, building up the company library of tennis images. Especially with the Olympics coming up, getting shots of international stars is very important. So because tennis is not covered very often, one of my primary goals was to shoot the early rounds like crazy. Second reason for doing there kind of relates to the first reason. I am currently scheduled to go cover the Olympics this summer in Beijing, so this also served as a "practice round," of sorts.
Now, tennis can be a very easy sport to shoot. In fact, just about anybody can do it. Give a monkey a camera, and it would be able to crank out image after image that looks like this:
What makes a good tennis shooter, is the same as what makes a good golf shooter. Move around and make something different! Because seriously, it's not that hard to get a picture of somebody hitting a ball back and forth. So some ideas of how to "make something different...." Set the scene....
Use the lines on the tennis court to add some context to the images as well as to clean up those backgrounds....
Use the shafts of light and shadows during the different times of days to make for some dramatic images....
And of course...EMOTION!
But Jerry, you never cover tennis... why were you down there? Well, a couple reasons. First off, building up the company library of tennis images. Especially with the Olympics coming up, getting shots of international stars is very important. So because tennis is not covered very often, one of my primary goals was to shoot the early rounds like crazy. Second reason for doing there kind of relates to the first reason. I am currently scheduled to go cover the Olympics this summer in Beijing, so this also served as a "practice round," of sorts.
Now, tennis can be a very easy sport to shoot. In fact, just about anybody can do it. Give a monkey a camera, and it would be able to crank out image after image that looks like this:
What makes a good tennis shooter, is the same as what makes a good golf shooter. Move around and make something different! Because seriously, it's not that hard to get a picture of somebody hitting a ball back and forth. So some ideas of how to "make something different...." Set the scene....
Use the lines on the tennis court to add some context to the images as well as to clean up those backgrounds....
Use the shafts of light and shadows during the different times of days to make for some dramatic images....
And of course...EMOTION!
posted by Jerry at 9:17 PM
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