It’s the images snapped mid-match that bring the US Open to life for millions around the world.<\/p>\n
“For 49 weeks a year, I am a commercial photographer and just a regular old human,” said Jen Pottheiser.<\/p>\n
But for these three weeks, Pottheiser leads the US Open photo team.<\/p>\n
“When we started, there were just a couple of us in a back room in the indoor building. There was no roof on Ashe,” she said.<\/p>\n
A decade later, her team has as many as 40 photographers, editors and engineers working on any given day of the tournament.<\/p>\n
“We’re here from first ball up to last ball down,” Pottheiser said.<\/p>\n
Photographers are scattered at their respective matches, snapping photos and sending them back in real time to a room where editors work to get them out as soon as possible.<\/p>\n
“One photo winds up going to Getty Images, to player social channels, to US Open internally to use on the website,” explained Reid Kelley, a team engineer.<\/p>\n
During a typical match, about 2,500 photos are taken. Of those, about 75 get pushed out.<\/p>\n
“Over the course of the tournament, it will be approaching 3 million photos. It’s a lot of photos,” Kelley said.<\/p>\n
“It’s really a pretty cool thing because, for most of us in the industry, we spend our lives working independently,” Pottheiser said. “And for three weeks we’re a team.”<\/p>\n
One of her teammates is Darren Carroll, who said he loves working alongside the action.<\/p>\n
“You can’t just get the same shot of somebody hitting a forehand 20 times,” he said. “It has to be from a different angle; it has to be forehands, backhands, serves, overheads, volleys.”<\/p>\n
Carroll said his job isn’t all that different from that of the athletes he covers. The same way a tennis player has to position themselves in anticipation of the next shot, Carroll has to do the same for his next shot.<\/p>\n
“Basically how you’re going to move around and strategize within the context of the game and changeovers and things like that, so there’s a whole lot of thought that goes into making sure you get what you need,” he said.<\/p>\n
He said it’s not luck, but rather making your own luck \u2014 a skill that allowed him to snap his favorite picture in his 15 years working the Open.<\/p>\n
“There’s a picture of Coco that’s my absolute favorite of her running down a shot backwards, she hit it over her head and I just happened to be in one of the dugouts at the end of the court and she ran right at me,” said Carroll.<\/p>\n
For Pottheiser, it’s not the action she loves.<\/p>\n
“I love the storytelling, the quiet moments away from all the madness. I got Novak walking off the court the other night, walking down the player tunnel \u2014 who knows if that’s going to be his last moment. Roger for his ring ceremony,” she said.<\/p>\n
“There’s something really humbling and exciting about being tasked to do your job when you are around the best people in the world at what they do, and that raises your game and raises the bar,” Pottheiser added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s the images snapped mid-match that bring the US Open to life for millions around the world. “For…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":342246,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[11101,25,9,24,12,63,122,124,123,319,11102,15547,27,200],"class_list":["post-342245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-app-sports","tag-app-top-stories","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-news","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-sports","tag-stef-manisero","tag-tennis","tag-top-stories","tag-vod"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=342245"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/342245\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/342246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=342245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=342245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=342245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}