Images from Indian Wells: Serena settles down

Capture and Caption: Over the final few days of the BNP Paribas Open at Indian Wells, photographer Anita Aguilar and senior writer Steve Tignor will recap all the matches.

Feliciano Lopez is still going strong—stronger than ever, actually—at age 33. After 15 years of coming to Indian Wells, he reached his first quarterfinal by upsetting...

...No 5 seed Kei Nishikori, who continues to struggle in the desert. Lopez was the more solid player all around, while Nishikori uncharacteristically misfired with his baseline attack.

Andy Murray, like Nishikori, has never loved the desert, but he mastered the elements, and a potentially tricky opponent in Frenchman Adrian Mannarino, in routine fashion, 6-3, 6-3. Murray will take a 9-0 head-to-head record into his quarterfinal with Lopez.

Simona Halep was all smiles after another three-set win, this one over Carla Suarez Navarro. Halep has said that she still feels bad about fading away so quickly in her Australian Open quarterfinal against Ekaterina Makarova. With multiple third-set victories this week, she has answered her own challenge.

Halep is an unassuming person and player, but she has some fierce fans.

Tomas Berdych doesn’t like to be compared to his countryman Lukas Rosol, so he showed what the difference between them is on Wednesday. Berdych won in three hard-hitting sets to advance to a quarterfinal clash with Roger Federer.

Is Berdych already thinking ahead? He struck a Federer-esque pose after his win.

Rafael Nadal continued to pound his serve with added velocity, and pound his opponents into submission.

This oppoment, Gilles Simon, made a couple of brief runs in the second set, but was overmatched the rest of the way.

Nadal says he doesn’t like the balls at Indian Wells this year, but they’ve done what he wanted so far. He’s lost six games, and no sets, in each of his three matches so far. He said he was looking forward to a round of golf on Thursday.

Roger Federer, who is slated to play Rafa in the semis, has been just as dominant as the Spaniard. After an easy win over Jack Sock, he’ll face a test from Berdych next. Federer leads their head to head 12-6, but they’re 3-3 since 2011.

Serena, in beating Timea Bacsinszky, gave the Indian Wells crowd a fist-pump...

...a smile...

...and one of her trademark twirls. She plays Halep, the No. 3 seed, next.

In winning, Serena brought Bacsisnzky’s two-tournament win streak to a halt. The Swiss challenged her the whole way.

It’s always frustrating, even for Novak Djokovic, when you play John Isner.

The American beat Djokovic in the semis here three years ago.

But Djokovic broke once in the first set with some brilliant returns, and then squeezed through a second-set tiebreaker for the win.

That was worth a (brief) celebration. On Thursday night, Djokovic will be back on court to play Bernard Tomic.

Isner, meanwhile, says good-bye to one of his favorite tournaments. Still, he seems to have put the despair of last weekend’s Davis Cup defeat behind him.