Most shoots go like this: someone picks the clothes, someone fixes my hair, and I do the same jump about forty times. Tournament day was the opposite. The brief was "just play", which is my favourite brief in the world.
The photographer set up behind the fence at my junior league semifinal with a lens roughly the size of a fire hydrant. The deal was that I would completely ignore her, which is easy, because when I'm playing I ignore everything. Mum says I once played through a wasp landing on my racquet hand. The wasp is fine. I won the point.
The weird part came after, seeing the photos. There's one of my serve toss where my whole face has gone full concentration mode, tongue out, eyebrows doing something dramatic. My first reaction was "delete it". The client's first reaction was "that's the campaign shot". They were right, apparently. It ran everywhere, tongue and all.
What I learned: the photos where you're actually doing the thing always beat the photos where you're pretending to do the thing. Also, we lost the final, but the photographer got a great shot of me shaking hands over the net and looking like a good sport. I was mostly thinking about snacks.