Slow Photography #84: Serve and Return ~Jimmy Connors and Fast Kodak Film

Caught on Film: Jimmy Connors returns serve to Stan Smith. 

Kodak has been a vital and important part of photography all my life. So, it was a thrill to learn this week's news that Kodak Alaris is bringing back T-Max Professional P-3200/TMZ film is coming back, March 2018 in 36 exposure rolls, after being discontinued 5 years ago. Film is Kodak's heritage.

Tennis is my heritage, but at the other end of the racket. I started playing amateur tennis when I was 9, but the pros, including Connors, were heroes who lived on another planet, visible through the distant telescope of TV. I craved a Wilson T2000 racket so I could hit as hard as Jimmy.

Now, I had the chance to cross over, and see bad boy Jimmy Connors up close. For 160 consecutive weeks, he ranked #1 in the world and when played in Denver, Colorado my senior year in high school, he was the men's singles champion of the Denver Open for the 3rd year.

At the time, playing for the Manual High School tennis team, I volunteered as a ball boy for part of this tournament. During one match, photographing from court side, I exposed 36 frames of the Connors-Smith match and because the two players were in continual motion only the one frame above had the tennis ball in reasonable focus. I made many copies of the image in the school's darkroom to get the tones right for a final archival photograph.

In 1978, fast film was still new, and to use high-speed film was truly a marvel, because the player's serves and strokes were moving too fast for 400 or even 800 ASA speed film.

For that match, I had a roll of Kodak TMAX 3200 film in the camera, and pushed the entire roll two stops, exposing and processing it at ASA 3200 (1:25, stand developed it in Rodinol in the high school darkroom, with instructions from Mr. Thomas Schultz, our photo teacher).

I wound up overexposing the highlights in the shot. It didn't matter. The experience of watching the pros play was preserved in black and white on paper, and in my dreams.