Inside The World Of Professional Tennis Photography
Tennis|Sept/Oct 2016

Inside the 14-frames-per-second world of professional tennis photography.

Stephen Tignor
Inside The World Of Professional Tennis Photography

The dugout at the south end of Arthur Ashe Stadium was overflowing, but a tense silence reigned inside. A swarm of photographers had squeezed themselves, and the prodigiously long, 12-pound cameras they were hauling, into this small, dark, low-ceilinged room. There they jostled for a view of the court, where Roger Federer and John Isner sprinted in and out of view a few feet above them.

The roar of 20,000 New Yorkers enveloped the players as they pushed each other late into this September evening. Federer had won the first two sets in tiebreakers, and now led 6–5 in the third. This US Open fourth-round match had reached its moment of truth—for Federer, Isner and the people who needed to capture their images for the world’s websites and newspapers.

While Isner gathered the balls to serve, a photographer from a French paper leaned back and exhaled.

“OK!” he barked as he shook out his arms and loosened his shoulders. “Match point!” Then he leaned toward his camera and, like a boxer taking a few shadow punches before a fight, pantomimed the motion of snapping a photo.

His colleagues followed his lead and straightened up in their chairs. Most had chosen their positions carefully after asking themselves a series of questions: Which side of the court would Federer, the likely victor, be on when he won? What did he usually do to celebrate? Which way would he look? Where was his player’s box?

As Federer hunkered down into his return position, the photographers double-checked their lens settings. A few of them had remarked, with nervous excitement, that they had rarely seen Federer so animated. The high-decibel, night-match atmosphere in Ashe, as well as Isner’s supersonic serve, had combined to make the 34-year-old as spry and alert as a man 10 years his junior.

This story is from the Sept/Oct 2016 edition of Tennis.

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This story is from the Sept/Oct 2016 edition of Tennis.

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