As the Championships’ photographic manager, Bob Martin appreciates the finer details of the images which every day capture the essence of Wimbledon. In this series celebrating the best of the AELTC’s talent behind the lens, he nominates his Picture of the Day
NOVAK DJOKOVIC MID AIR
This image of Novak Djokovic, taken by Jed Leicester on July 10, 2015, is awesome on many levels. There’s the incredible athleticism of Djokovic’s lunge, the way the surreally balletic pose is captured mid-air, the stunning layering of player, racket and ball with their counterpart shadows.
“This is one of the best pictures from 2015,” says Bob. “It’s a great shot looking down on Centre Court on to the player, which gives you grass as the iconic Wimbledon backdrop. It’s a classic action shot, but what’s truly fantastic about it is the way the interesting elements of the picture stack up: racket, ball, shadow racket, shadow ball. It’s a picture that invites you in. What’s happening? He can’t get to the ball… so he’s ended up throwing his racket at it?”
Jed Leicester recalls the day well. The occasion was the semi-final when Djokovic, the defending champion, was playing the No.21 seed Richard Gasquet of France for the chance to face seven-times champion Roger Federer in the final. This was Djokovic’s annus mirabilis, when the Serb became only the fourth man in history to reach the final of all four majors; the 2015 Novak Djokovic tennis season is generally considered one of the greatest of all time boasting a Wikipedia entry of its own.
“A picture from this match was only ever going to be one of Djokovic, who was on a massive hot streak that year,” says Jed. “I had focused 90 per cent of the match on him. It was either going to be a win and a ‘hooray’ picture or a loss and his head in his hands. But with Djokovic, you know that at some point he’s going to launch himself or do the splits. It’s a sign that he’s fired up. In terms of players throwing themselves around, my favourite is Gael Monfils, followed closely by Djokovic, Dominic Thiem, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, and Dustin Brown for air and hair. For me, a dive beats the splits, but it’s a close thing. These moments come like lightning. Ordinarily you don’t aim at a player with his back to you, but he happened to scramble and lunge and then in desperation threw his racket at the ball.”
The photograph was taken at 3.22pm. “The key thing is the shadow of the ball and racket - without it, this image would be unfinished. The best thing about it is that the shadow is so perfectly racket-shaped. It was a bit of luck that he dived at all, and that he dived when the afternoon sun was at this angle. Centre Court light goes at about quarter to six in the evening.”
This image has not been cropped. Jed talks about luck but anticipation played a huge part in capturing this image, too. “Normally I set the focus on the player, but if I had done that, he would have dived out of the picture and I’d have inadvertently cut out the shadow, so I set the focus point to the side of Djokovic.”
Technical info: This image was shot on a Canon EOS 1DX, at a shutter speed of 1/2000th of a second with an F4 aperture using a 500mm and a sensitivity setting of 200 ASA.
