Summer’s here and its time for summer sports, in this case lawn tennis.

I ventured over to Ilkley Tennis Club to watch some tennis and to understand the possibilities photographically and I was very pleasantly surprised by the whole set-up, especially the friendly, helpful nature of the staff. The idea really was to just recce the place with a view to returning and grabbing some sports images but such was the opportunity that I just got down to shooting. Initially, I was watchful to make sure that I wasn’t going to be challenged whilst ensuring that I did not impact the players or spectators but soon forgot about the prospect of being stopped. As with all things photographically there are techniques to be applied or learned and this was no different, the day was bright and sunny so shutter speeds were kept fast without upping the ISO too much. There’s always a degree of items that interfere with the simplicity and cleanliness of images but I’m quite adept with the clone stamp and they’re soon gone. I tried to get a variety of images – serves, returns, smashes, slices, etc and amassed 7,000+ images over two days so I guess I will be busy with the delete key too. Some images are below and many more can be seen here.