Two - Tennis

This summer I was asked if I was willing to help out with the middle school tennis team. Our school had never had middle school tennis, and at that point nobody had even agreed to coach it. I said yes for several reasons, but mostly to spend more time with Hannah doing something we both enjoyed. Plus I thought it would be fun. You can read the whole story here if you haven't already.

I decided to use my photography to raise some money for the team for future equipment purchases. I took portraits of all 24 players. Each player had two poses, one that was safe and I thought the Moms would like, the other a more dramatic, fun, magazine cover type shot. I wanted the kids to have some ownership in it too so I printed a few pages of ideas - tennis and sports photos that I had found online - that they could look through for ideas to keep the process moving. I told them they didn't have to smile if they didn't want to... and a lot of them didn't. I think they really enjoyed being able to do whatever they wanted - I had a great response from all of them with it. To kick it up a notch, I took those dramatic photos and put them on magazine covers I created in Photoshop. I put them each on two magazines - ESPN and Tennis. These covers were available for them to order with standard print sizes. They were very well received by the parents in most cases, and had several order prints of them. I even printed small proof sheets that I let the kids keep, so even if they didn't order any photos, they could keep the small wallet sized proof to hang in their locker or wherever.

The photo above is an example of one of the magazine covers (although I removed the students name for privacy reasons). Below you see some of my other favorites from the shoot.