ROME (AP) — Alessandra Tarantino was hired by AP in 2005. She is based in Rome and covers major events in the city, in Vatican City and across Italy. She has also covered the Olympics, soccer tournaments and tennis tournaments around the world.
Here’s what she had to say about this extraordinary photo of Jannik Sinner at the Italian Open tennis tournament.
Why this photo?
First of all, Sinner is a great player, but we photographers have various problems photographing him. The first is that the matches are often too fast, and the second is the cap with the visor! We all look forward to the day when he will let his beautiful red hair loose. That’s why I went to this spot under the court where there’s a small, slightly high window, because it’s easier to capture his expression after he scores a point. When I came down, the spot was strangely empty, and this allowed me to try a few shots with the entire silhouette of the window.
How I made this photo
So I used the 50mm f/1.4, a very bright and sharp lens that allows for extremely fast shutter speeds (1/8000th of a second in this case) and to “freeze” the ball on the racket. The window is quite high, so I couldn’t look through the viewfinder, only at the back of the camera, keeping my arms up. The fast and precise tracking of the new Sony cameras and the pre-shoot function did the rest. In this case, I didn’t edit the photo myself, but my colleague Antonio Calanni did, to whom I sent the full file directly from the camera. He had the merit of seeing what I was seeing. Antonio framed the photo better, bringing out its full value.
Why this photo works
I think the photo works because of the twilight colors, enhanced by the black frame, the visible part of the format — almost 16:9 — and the feeling of peeking at what’s happening through a hole that no one knows about. The very shallow depth of field of the 50mm leaves Sinner as the only sharply defined element in the photo; the logos, sponsors, and everything else become blurred, like an impressionist painting — but you can still sense everything else: the crowd, and that slightly magical moment when, in a stadium full of people, all you hear is the sound of the ball hitting the racket.
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