Tennis
2009 Holiday Special Sports Part 1

Let's start off this section with the sports that has the fastest ball on Earth: Tennis! I remembered that when I first started photography and later got exposed to DSLR, I asked my senior when will we be shooting at 1/8000th of a sec, the fastest setting on the camera? He told me i) You shoot a rocket takeoff (probably not in sg-_-) ii) a flying tennis ball! I was quickly reminded of this as I entered the Tennis court and many ppl tell me not to stand anywhere where the ball has a high chance to hit you~ (And I dun wan to try getting hit either)

Generally, many beginning sports shooter will first try to shoot the players serving as it is highly predictable. For tennis, players tend to stretch high and serve the ball, reason simply is to get maximum reach~ And it seems that players make the most effort (strength-wise and the 'urgh' sound i always hear) during serving as compared to other times where more agility is required.

Talking about strength, I believe that among racket sports, Tennis players have the most strength as it simply requires quite some effort to drive a ball that's not light at all. So you always see your favourite Tennis players with very toned muscles.. And these muscles simply strain up when they return a ball as we can see above~

A tennis player once told me before that a good player will control his opponent by making him/her run around. I believe that's quite the same for many other racket sports as well. But it's definitely not easy as you need excellent ball control to drive the ball in your desired direction~ I realise that in Tennis, players have a tendency to run left/right rather than front/back. Perhaps it's harder to control the strength (which determines reach) than the direction. But here is one of the few running forward shots~ (I love it when player's hair fluff up!)

Lastly, shooting doubles is always challenging as it's real hard to keep both players in the frame. And sometimes you do see funny scenes like this during doubles~(at last! Quite a long post huh~)