Back to Centre Court (Your Call, 5.23)

Hi everyone. With less than 24 hours to go until the start of the year's next Grand Slam we're expecting a fairly slow day in TW. However, I hope that it might entertain some of you to see a selection of the pictures I took last Sunday on Wimbledon Centre Court, when the new roof was shown off for the first time. I've prepared a web gallery - to go through the pages use the arrows, and enlarge any picture you like by clicking on it. Anyone doing a count of the pictures of each player will quickly work out that my lens loved Steffi Graf the most. I make no excuses - I've photographed each of the other three players before, but not Steffi, and I defy any aspiring sports photographer to not get excited at having a maybe-once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of photographing the owner of 22 Grand Slam titles in action from the photographers' pit on Wimbledon Centre Court.

However, there was another factor at work, I think. As most of you know I'm a keen amateur photographer rather than a pro, and it sometimes takes me a while to get "tuned in" to the rhythms of photographing any particular player. Perhaps I'm also being naive, or risking missing key moments, but I also often prefer to turn off the "fast burst" mode on my camera when following the players. Most pros use this in order to get more than one chance at capturing a critical moment, and I'll use it myself some of the time. However, I've become convinced that it's important to learn as I go, so when I turn off the burst mode I'm accepting the challenge of picking the right moment to depress the shutter. I'll probably get more failed shots as a result, but sometimes I'm surprised - and that's what happened when I concentrated on Steffi Graf through the lens. It appears that the way she times her shots is so regular that I didn't have much difficulty in picking key moments.

It also helps that she's such a graceful mover, of course - there aren't too many unflattering camera angles. I've previously commented that I once took a very long unbroken sequence of pictures of Roger Federer on Court Philippe Chatrier - probably over twenty minutes - that contained no unusable pictures at all - he appears to share the same "timing precision" with Graf (and to be honest, one-handed backhands also often photograph better than two-handers).

Before the French Open begins tomorrow, just to get in the mood, I've been watching one of my old tapes from the tournament - the 1992 Ladies Singles final between Graf and Monica Seles, one of my all-time favourite tennis duels. We've had some recent discussions about classic matches, and this one pretty much had it all, including a fine contrast between the styles of the two women, with Seles hitting double-handers off both wings. Graf saved four Championship points while down 3-5 in the third set, and leveled the match. Seles eventually broke serve again to go up 8-7 after Graf put a forehand out, but was broken back. Seles broke again to go up 9-8, and this time served the match out, though not before Graf saved another Championship point. The final scoreline was 6-2, 3-6, 10-8 to Seles, who had done battle not only with her opponent, but also most of the crowd, who were fiercely behind the German. I thoroughly recommend locating a copy of the match if you haven't seen it before.

I hope you all find similarly entertaining ways of spending the rest of the time before the first ball is struck in Paris. I'll be providing the Crisis Centers over the next few days, beginning at around 5 a.m. TW time (US Eastern Standard Time), or 11 a.m. local time.

-- Rosangel Valenti