The Ladies Get Busy

Enough with the press conferences and publicity stunts, it's time for some top flight tennis.
This is a quick panorama of the media pit that sits along both sides of the court.
It's called the Olympus Photo Pit, as Olympus is a sponsor of the Women's tour.
This was shot with the 9-18mm, so the distance to the court and the players area is actually much closer than appears in this photo. You are actually about 10 ft. back of the players area.


Here, Maria Sharapova unloads her newly 'rebuilt' serve on her opponent. Perhaps showing the effects of her long layoff due to a shoulder injury, she played a sloppy game with many unforced errors and a whopping 15 double faults. Although she still managed to best Austria's Sybille Bammer, it was a shaky outing for the former number one.


Here the current Number one player in the world returns against Frances plucky Avanne Rezai who pulled a shocking upset beating the top seed 3-6, 6-2, 6-4.
The advantage of the close proximity really gives you an insight into the matches. From court level it was very obvious that Safin was beating herself.
After every serve, every shot she would get down on herself grabbing a towel from a ball boy at one point and screaming loudly into it. Too much intensity.
After the match I passed Safin in the hallway on the way to the media centre. She looked very shaken up, and red-eyed from crying. She was also soaked in sweat to the point it looked like she'd showered in her clothes.
Sometimes sport analysts in Canada speculate that players bring less then their best game to The Rogers Cup, preferring to focus on the US Open which is two weeks later. I don't think that was the case with Safin. She was pretty upset with the loss.

And here is Aravanne Rezai returning a backhand shot. If you look closely you'll see dust particles suspended in mid-air in front of the path of her raquet. Those are peices of fuzz off the tennis ball she's just launched back at her opponent. These appear in a lot of tennis shots and are particularly noticeable at 100 percent viewing on a monitor.

Lastly Sharapova lunges for a backhand return.
The lighting, as always, was very challenging during the day matches. The sun comes from an awkward rear angle and this is made worse by hats and vizors the players wear.

Most shots needed one stop of minus exposure compensation to factor out the dark background. I also used auto gradation to try to gain something back in the shadows cast by the hats.

From a photographer's point of view it would be worth running the lights during the day as sunny days at The Rexall Centre are very challenging photographically, but that's not going to happen.

All photos done with Olympus E30 cameras, with 35-100mm f2 and 150mm f2 lenses, 1.4 teleconverter, and 9-18mm lens.

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