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World Photo

US Open 2005 by Ron Chemtob Last month, TGP contributor Ron Chemtob attended the 2005 US Open in Flushing, Queens with his Minolta Dimage X1 digital camera.  Here are some of the great shots he ended up with. Article rating: 7.60

I got 5 tickets for the US Open on September 6th 2005. I decided to go with my wife, my friend and his wife, and my brother-in-law. We took along my new Minolta Dimage X1 8 Mega pixel Digital camera with 3x optical zoom and Anti-Shake technology.

© 2005 Ron Chemtob

© 2005 Ron Chemtob

© 2005 Ron Chemtob

Normally I would like a camera that would have a lot more zoom than just a basic 35-105 for an event like this, but it’s the only camera I had access to at the time, so I figured the eight mega pixels would compensate somewhat for the lack of zoom (I would be able to crop out the outside of the image, and still have enough resolution to print a nice image).

We got there right before the first match which featured Maria Sharapova vs. Nadia Petrova. Our seats happened to be pretty close (about 15 rows up) in the middle of the court.

The 3x zoom happened to be sufficient because our seats were so close. In the second match we saw Venus Williams vs. Kim Clijsters. We moved down for this match down to the FIRST row (Thank god the people who were supposed to sit there never showed).

In the first set of the second match is where I got most of my pictures. Being that I was so close, I got trigger happy and would not stop snapping away at taking pictures of the players. The anti-shake that’s built in the camera definitely helps with the picture shake, but it does slow down the camera in picture taking (I guess you can’t have your cake and eat it too!).

What I decided to do was focus the camera about 5 seconds before I wanted to take the picture and then just snap about a second before I wanted to, so that I could get the picture I wanted. Not the best situation but needed the anti-shake. Trying to get snapshots of the players standing around would never happen. No matter how often I asked the players to smile at the camera (Yeah right!) they would not look in our directions.

All in all, if you factor in the size of the camera, the megapixel count, and the anti-shake feature, I would say that this camera is definitely worth the money. While it may not have been designed for sports photography, it made a perfectly suitable stand-in.

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