Tennis, anyone?

The New York Times assigned me to cover the Rogers Cup women's tennis tournament here in Toronto this week, specifically to provide new images of some of the top seeds for their upcoming US Open preview. It was a great assignment because I only needed to focus on one of the players in any given match, and because the preview isn't coning out until next week, I wasn't on deadline.

The media people at the Rexall Centre were great, helping out with additional power outlets for laptops & battery chargers, and getting glitches with the wireless network straightened out very quickly.

The assignment was a lot of fun and it allowed me to play with a few different things like slowing way down on my shutter speed when I photographed Serena Williams' match against Stephanie Cohen-Aloro of France....sometimes we forget that photography is supposed to be fun.

Take a breath...

In early July, due to a series of very strange travel arrangements made on my behalf, I found myself in International Falls, MN. On Memorial Day. As you might imagine, there really wasn't much going on in the town of 9000 as I checked into the Holiday Inn at 7:00pm and as it was 7:00pm, I was getting kind of hungry.

I grabbed a camera body & two lenses out of my backpack, got back in the rental car and as I often think when I'm on the road, "I'm going to go out & find something, and I'm going to eat it". It being Memorial Day I'm not overly confident, but off I go.

Half way between the hotel and 'downtown' I see an athletic park with a football field and a couple of baseball diamonds. I'm already past the entrance, but the rearview mirror shows me that there are two Little League games in progress. Up ahead is a Subway: Food and a place to turn around. I grab a 6" smoked turkey and a lemonade and head back to the park. Leaving 'dinner' in the car, I grab my gear and walk over to the nearest diamond. The infield is already in the shadow of the back-stop, so I walk around to the second field. There isn't a cloud in the sky and the light is just golden. It's pushing 8:00 by now and the sun is going down fast, but that light...oh, that light.

Sometimes, and much, much more often than it actually is, it should just be about the game. As I was standing outside the third base foul fence between #1's mom and #15's dad with a few mosquitoes and more than a few black flies vying for my attention, I remembered a story that quoted USA Today photographer Jack Gruber. "Back up. Take a breath. And just look around..." I've shot the big leagues, I've shot celebrities, and I'm currently working on a large portrait project involving Canadian Olympic athletes, but sometimes we get so caught up in the real world that we forget the REAL WORLD.