I’ve decided that a blue tennis court is my new most favorite thing right now. Last year Recanati had a fine-looking green hard court, this year they painted it blue (and still green on the outs). I like the new color so much that this morning not even the 40 degrees (centigrades!) discouraged me from getting out there and shoot, shoot, shoot.
As one comedian used to say: I like it.
The tournament is midway through, tomorrow the second round will be completed, leaving only 8 players fighting for the title. Among them won’t be Riccardo Ghedin, who put up a good fight today against the number two seed Sergey Stakhovsky. Ghedin is a fun player to watch, he’s very aggressive and serves & volleys pretty often, at least on this surface.
Stakhovsky isn’t boring, either and not the waiting type, even though my picture shows him on the defense, scrambling:
Tomorrow play will star at 6 pm, which kinda sucks because there’s only one good hour of light to shoot at 200 or 400 ISO with high shutter speeds (I like to keep at least 1/1600 with tennis if I can). Of course I can up the ISO and later on the light is beautiful (the magic hour, you know) but harsh and bright do help with action.
Amazingly enough, two posts in one day. I almost feel like a blogger :D
Recanati’s ATP Challenger is on this week and I’m there with my beloved camera. Recanati’s the only Italian Challenger played on hard-courts and this year they have been painted a nice combination of green and blue (it used to be all green) which looks fantastic. And very US Open-ish ;)
The weekend saw the qualifiers fighting for a place in the Main Draw, which starts this afternoon. Here’s a few shots, first Morocco’s Rabie Chaki:
Then his “victim” in the Qualifying second round, Italian Thomas Fabbiano:
Young up-and-coming Grigor Dimitrov, who lost in the first round Saturday:
And Nikola Mektic, who ousted him:
And can I just say I hate when players wear a hat that casts a shadow on their faces? Well, I do.
These guys on the left are Yu Xin-Yuan e Zeng Shao Xuan and they're going to be, most probably, China's doubles team at the next Olympics. Xin and Shao have been teaming up forever, they're both from Bejing and are currently the number 1 doubles team in China.
I don't know the name of (sorry man :) ). They're all very polite, very professional and a joy to watch play because they really play doubles, no "parallel singles" with this two like it happens with some many other doubles teams these days.
It's now been a week since I've started using my brand new Canon 70-200 f4 (the non IS version). To be honest, I was expecting a smoother path: the first few days my keepers' rate had drastically fallen and I was beginning to fear there was actually something wrong with my copy. I'm still not convinced everything is fine, because it doesn't seem as sharp as I was expecting it to be but the last few days things have improve dramatically. As soon as I get home I plan to post a couple of test shots on PotN forum to inquire about the sharpness issue, but so far I'm tending very strongly toward user error to explain the bad results (what a surprise there, uh? ;) ).
If I should make a comparison with my old Tamron (a very unfair comparison: we're talking € 450 of price difference here) the first thing that jumps to my eyes, even in the bad pictures, is the absence of any noticeable chromatic aberration (for noticeable I mean something that's immediately evident, even when you look at the picture at 50 % of its actual resolution). The Tamron was really awful in this department and I'm very, very pleased that my days of correcting bluish edges are over. And then, there's the autofocus. Man, this thing is faaaaaaaaast. Look at the picture here: this was undoubtedly a lucky shot, but with the Tamron it would have been almost impossible to get, it would have never focused fast enough to catch it without serious blurring.