Shot tennis for the first time in over a year, on Thursday.
© 2011 by The York Dispatch. Spring Grove's Chris Mathews returns the ball to Northeastern's Lance Sanderson during a match at Spring Grove Area High School on Thursday, March 17, 2011.
One of the coaches was initially hesitant to let me inside the court to make pictures during the matches.
“Well, you can take pictures while they’re warming up,” she said. “It’s just that last time there was a photographer from [another newspaper], the shutter clicks really bothered the boys.”
I said I couldn’t run photos of practice — I had to get the matches themselves. I also didn’t want to get stuck taking photos from outside the fence.
“Did the other photographer just take photos incessantly? Was he or she just gunning the camera on motordrive?” I asked.
The coach said yes.
“Well, that’s not how I shoot tennis,” I said. “For me, I take one shot for every one of their shots. I don’t motordrive tennis. I’m a lot more selective, and it won’t be distracting to the boys.”
She let me go inside.
© 2011 by The York Dispatch. Spring Grove's John King returns the ball to Northeastern's Stuart Reilly during a match at Spring Grove Area High School on Thursday, March 17, 2011.
I’m not naming the other photographer nor where he/she worked, but I was surprised that someone would want to shoot tennis — or baseball, or softball — that way. In my experience, you either get the peak action, with the ball in the frame, or you don’t. Gunning your shutter is a futile and noisy waste of frames.
In my experience, at least. That said, my camera can only give me 3.9 frames per second in continuous mode. I guess if I had a faster frames-per-second rate, motordriving would be more appealing… but again, not in tennis, baseball or softball.
© 2011 by The York Dispatch. Northeastern's Lance Sanderson serves the ball to Spring Grove's Chris Mathews during a match at Spring Grove Area High School on Thursday, March 17, 2011.
Or maybe I’m just crazy.
Words and Light 
Back in the Review days, we were doing a story about tennis, and none of the photos actually had the ball in frame. So one of the editors photoshopped in a ball. This resulted in a long lecture from VDP about journalistic ethics. The editor, however, argued that it was no different than framing a shot where you throw in a ball and then take a picture of it, which may have been acceptable. Is that fine?
Either way, whenever I see pictures of tennis, it makes me think of this.
Why would somebody throw in a ball and take a picture of it? How is that ethical? That’s setting up a shot, not taking a photo of something that’s real and authentic.
Ah, VDP.