String Quartet

Thank Goodness I Don't Have Tennis Elbow

Photographs copyright: DAVID McMAHON

This sequence was shot some weeks ago, using the wonderful SMC Pentax-DA 1:2.8mm macro lens. I thought these would be perfect for this week's "string" theme, especially since I used to cover Wimbledon as a tennis writer.

You know the strings that criss-cross your tennis racquet? There was a story that Bjorn Borg's Donnay racquets used to be strung to such high tension that it was not uncommon for them to snap in the middle of the night, even before he had struck a ball with them.

Every grand slam tournament has its own racquet stringers and I once read an interview with a man who did the job at the Australian Open. He mentioned that players' representatives simply used to drop the racquets off to him, but occasionally one or two of the stars would drop by to thank him for a job well done.

The racquet in these shots is just a standard Wilson - and I took the shots in our front yard, not in a studio. I simply wanted to test the lens in normal conditions. That's why I started out by shooting the tiny knot that shows the end point of the racquet-stringing technique.

I thought the lens was really good, because it even showed up specks of dust on the racquet frame, so then I started shooting the mid-section of the stringed surface.

That's when I noticed something that I hadn't spotted with the naked eye. The magnificent lens was actually picking up minuscule pieces of fluff from the yellow Slazenger balls that I use.

Look carefully and you'll even see the light-and-dark pattern of the synthetic material that is used to string these racquets. And when I sat down to write this post, I recalled an interesting piece of tennis trivia. You see, yellow balls were introduced to make it easier for television viewers to follow the path of a ball on their screen.

So here's a trivia question, specially for you. Do you know when Wimbledon finally switched from white tennis balls to yellow tennis balls? Scroll to the bottom of this post for the answer.

(Trivia answer: Wimbledon introduced yellow tennis balls in 1986.)

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