Tennis Rallies in Street Photograhy
10 DEC, 2025
Strolling the streets of Bucharest with a camera I ask myself what keeps the drive alive. During the “dry spells” when nothing happens around its easy to get lost into internal chain of thoughts about “why” and “what for”. Those thoughts could lead into several ways for me ranging from giving myself another several blocks to find interesting trigger for my eye to absurdity of general contest of photography genre.
Coming from the tennis background the result always stood on the top of priority list, but practicing photography pinpointed me to other several patterns that tied my interest together whether its a tennis court or street wandering. No matter how long you have been playing tennis - the level of focus is slowly drained out of you during games, sets, or long rallies. The level of mental focus slowly draining away is sometimes barely noticeable, but it stacks up incrementally with uneven coefficients to hit you at the end with a massive drop of quality shots played. Street Photography is similar in that way. I believe, there is a sweet spot when you can be truly focused on environment, short stints of focusing on certain scenes as those tennis rallies, turn on/turn off. Your internal focus battery slowly goes down, depending on the scenes and topics you’d like to focus on during that day.
With my assumption of street photography being much less demanding exercise - I believed that full session of street photography during the day can be much longer than average tennis match of one hour and thirty minutes. Moreover, I was more than confident that having sports background in individual sport of high focus will give me advantage to shoot much longer sessions, be efficient and come back home with pure gold photos. However, in the seeds of naivity I found that being honest about your capacity today is much more beneficial to the end result of the session.
At the current moment, I can give myself honest timeframe of 1-2 hours and then a same break to recharge the focus. Despite watching some of the other photographers having sessions of full day shooting and intense periods of non-stop walking it’s seems to be more draining for me to keep the balance of joy and end result. In that honest statement to myself I found the main similarity for tennis focus, keep your full engagement in the moment like during the rally and turn off, recharge for the next point.
I was thoroughly impressed with Moriyama’s philosophy that stuck to him as a wandering dog strolling through the streets and ignoring the viewfinder relying on the trigger of the eye and sometimes there days like that, but i also want to leave a percentage of that to be more intentional in the moment why my eye was triggered to that particular scene in the moment. With some battery left in the tank there is enough room for reflection. Otherwise, that reflection can be done later or months after when i look at those photos again.
At the end of the day, my desire for being efficient with long hour sessions, grabbing as much locations as possible were rooted back to the fundamentals of sports from childhood - spread out my energy to the full match, and second missing ingridient which was added by street photography walks - keeping the joy while expecting the result. Experience what the day and the world around gives you in a current moment.
Today’s Writing Soundtrack:
Bonobo - Cirrus
Hauschka - Hike
Midnight in Peckham - Chaos in The CBD
If this sparked any thoughts, I’d be glad to hear from you on Insta @rutnytskyi