Pete Sampras

This image was shot from high up on Suzanne Lenglen Court at the Roland Garros, home of the French Open.

Pete usually didn’t last too long on clay courts, as his serve (possibly the best ever) wasn’t as dominant, so this was definitely shot in the tournament’s first week.

And in general, I was shooting high speed sequences for instructional purposes, not single action shots – but hey, if a good idea for an image presents itself, I’m going to take it.

Any idea what caught my eye – or, as most good images are ideas based, what’s the big idea here?

The clue is in the title Swooshmeister – the shape of Pete’s arms and racket pretty much emulate the shape of the Nike swoosh on his shirt.

And basically that’s it. Or at least it would’ve been, if I’d shot Fuji slide film instead of print film.

For some reason I amassed bags of print film over the space of a year, which I would use up on high speed instructional sequence photos (I still have a bag full undeveloped).

Anyhow, I later realised my film scanner hates print film (as do most neg and slide scanners), the stuff I was using has no scanner profile and – unlike with transparency film – it never gets the colour right, so I had to mess around with the image to get it looking something like.

But a good picture in the end (of one of my least favourite players!).