Why I Photograph Junior Tennis
Over the years, I have had the opportunity to photograph tennis at the very highest level – Grand Slam tournaments, the ATP Finals, the Davis Cup, and matches featuring the world’s best players. But now, working for the Moldovan Tennis Federation, I regularly pick up my cameras and go out to photograph a very different kind of tennis – junior tennis. Sometimes it is 14–16-year-olds, sometimes 12-year-olds, and occasionally even younger children.
One could say that it is simply part of my job. The Federation needs photographs of tournaments, winners, finals, and award ceremonies. That is all true. But there is another reason, one that is personally much more interesting to me: junior tennis helps me stay in photographic shape.
And I am not talking about technique. The ability to set the shutter speed, use autofocus correctly, or catch the ball close to the strings of the racket no longer depends on how regularly I photograph these events. That is the muscle memory of the profession. What matters far more is something else – the ability to see and anticipate the unexpected.
Professional tennis is, in a certain sense, very predictable. If you spend many years photographing the same players, you gradually begin to know them almost as well as their coaches do. Of course, I am exaggerating, but a photographer really does study a tennis player. You know how they serve, where they will be after a shot, how they celebrate winning an important point, where they will look after making a mistake.
Matthew Stockman, one of Getty Images’ most experienced tennis photographers, advises studying exactly these things before a shoot: whether a player is right-handed or left-handed, whether they come to the net, where they end up after a rally, and how they react to winning and losing points. According to him, the repetitive nature of tennis is actually an advantage for a photographer – it allows you to learn a player’s rhythm and prepare for the moment in advance.
With children, that pattern regularly breaks down.
You sit there with your camera, convinced that you understand what is about to happen. A child wins a crucial point – and instead of the expected shout, quietly turns away. A minute later, they win a completely routine rally – and suddenly clench a fist as if they have just won Wimbledon.
They lose a point – they look at their coach. They win one – they look at their mother. Then suddenly they laugh. Two games later, they are barely holding back tears. And five minutes after that, they are running around the court again and seem to have completely forgotten what happened before.
Try predicting that.
That is precisely why a junior tournament becomes excellent training for a photographer’s reactions and powers of observation. You cannot rely entirely on your accumulated library of familiar movements and reactions. You have to start watching closely again.
There is another challenge – the technique of the game itself.
A professional tennis player’s movement has been refined through thousands of hours of practice. If I know the player, I have a fairly good idea of where the racket, the body, and the ball will be during the phase of the forehand or serve that I want to capture. An 11- or 12-year-old player’s technique is still developing. One ball might be struck almost textbook-perfectly, the next somewhere behind the body, and for the third they might suddenly invent a movement that probably does not exist in any coaching manual.
For a coach, that is material to work with. For a photographer, it is a gift.
Because the technical correctness of a movement and its photogenic quality are two completely different things. Sometimes it is precisely a technically imperfect movement that creates fantastic geometry in the frame: a child literally folds around the ball, takes off when you least expect it, desperately stretches for a ball that seemed all but lost. A professional might have handled the same situation much more efficiently. But the photograph might have been less interesting.
There is a good rule in sports photography: you need to know the sport well enough to understand what is going to happen a second from now. Junior tennis adds a second half to that rule: at the same time, you must be prepared for something completely different to happen.
That is a very useful state for a photographer to be in.
Because professional experience also has a downside. The longer you work, the more ready-made solutions you accumulate. This is a good place to photograph the serve. From here, the forehand will look good. After match point, stay on the winner’s face. Then the handshake. Then the team’s reaction. Everything is correct, everything is professional – and everything is already familiar.
And sometimes it is useful for a photographer when the familiar pattern stops working.
Children force you to hunt for the photograph again rather than reproduce it. To watch not only the racket and the ball, but also the eyes, the hands, the parents in the stands, the coach, the opponent. Not to lower the camera immediately after the rally. Or sometimes, on the contrary, to lower it and look around, because at that very second the real photograph may be happening somewhere other than on the court.
Getty Images photographer Hannah Peters puts it very accurately when she talks about sports photography: sport can produce genuine emotion in a fraction of a second, and a single photograph can explain a person’s state of mind at that particular moment. In junior sport, in my view, there are simply more of those fractions of a second. Children have not yet learned to completely hide what they are feeling.
And this brings another responsibility. When photographing a child, it is especially important to understand the difference between a powerful photograph and exploiting someone else’s vulnerability. Tears after a defeat can make a magnificent photograph, but that does not necessarily mean that this particular image should be published. Junior sport demands no less professional ethics from a photographer than elite sport – and sometimes even more. International and national tennis organizations separately regulate the use of images of minors and the need for appropriate consent for photography and publication.
Perhaps that is why I sometimes return from a junior tournament with more unexpected material than I do from a professional one.
Not necessarily better in quality. Not necessarily more spectacular. But often – more alive.
For me, these shoots are a kind of professional training ground. An opportunity from time to time to step outside the familiar world of elite tennis, where you already know a great deal in advance, and once again find yourself in a situation where you have no idea what will happen five seconds from now.
And for a sports photographer, that is perhaps one of the most useful states to be in.
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