State Tennis, Day 1...

This year's format for the state golf and tennis tournaments were a little different. For me all the tennis was on Monday and Tuesday, as usual, but golf was all at the end of the week. This made things a little bit easier, in that I could spend all my time focused on shooting tennis and didn't have to worry about getting out to the golf courses and figuring out the best way to split my time. Now, my only problem was the 30 mile gap between where the 3A schools were playing at UT's Penick-Allison courts and Abilene High playing in the 5A tournament at Lakeway, which I still despise.

Wylie, as usual, was taking pretty much their whole team to the state tournament. Abilene High had a singles player and a doubles team there. This would have made for a really fun couple of days, had they not been playing on opposite sides of the city. The original plan was to go to Lakeway first to shoot the Abilene High players in the first round then run back to Austin to shoot what Wylie players who had made it to the second round (which was expected to be quite a few. Well, in usual Lakeway fashion, everything got backed up. With 16 matches scheduled to be played on 12 courts, something had to give, and they something was the 11:15 match was almost two hours late. Finally I got to shoot the first set of the doubles match and was able to get on my way to make the 40 minute trip to shoot the second round at Penick-Allison, who of course, was on time, like always. During the couple hours I was there I ended up shooting five different matches. The thing I like most about Penick is the stadium styled courts which allow me to shoot from from up high as well as going down and shooting on the courts. Shooting tennis from up high is great since it allows me to with nice clean backgrounds. Since none of the high schools have stadium courts it allows for a different look than the rest of the year.

While I was at Lakeway shooting Erin Walker's singles match, it was kind of an overcast day. After getting a few nice safe shots, I figured I play around a little bit with some slow shutter shots. The great thing about tennis is you can show up and get a useable shot in just a few minutes if need be. However, if you have time to shoot the whole match it allows you to play around a little bit and experiment. I ended up getting a couple of shots I liked and a whole bunch of them that didn't work, but that's pretty much expected. Overall it wasn't too bad of a day for the first two rounds given the lack of emotion from the events.