Tennis

We’re now in Toronto watching the Rogers Cup Women’s Tennis. Today we watched two matches in the sweltering heat: Yastremska beat Konta 63 62 and Wozniaki beat Putintseva 64 62. I brought my sony point-and-shoot and took at few (thousand) pictures. It’s not my usual subject matter and I probably won’t bring the camera to any of the remaining matches but below are a few samples. For any camera geeks: the camera is a sony RX10M4, set to continuous focusing at 20 frames per second, aperture priority with maximum aperture (f4), autoISO with minimum shutter speed 1/2000th of a second (so it will raise the ISO to ensure the minimum shutter speed – a common feature on Sony cameras). The focus area is set to wide and the tennis player is in the middle of the frame. The camera will pick out the highest contrast subject closest to the camera and closest to the centre of the frame. Due to the wonders of modern technology all of the several thousand pictures are in focus (at least I haven’t found one out of focus yet). Professional photographers would not use such a camera, however, because it is only useful in good light (so their gear is typically 10 times more expensive – and an equivalent amount heavier). The reason, you see professional sports photographers with monopods is not because they need them to take a better picture; it’s because the lens on the camera is too heavy to hand hold for any longer than a few minutes.

First – a couple of shots of Konta: