First post...

I have been working at this event for the last eleven years. I think it is eleven. Certainly long enough for the green and purple pixels of individual years to have blurred into one big smudge of all things Wimbledon. Each year brings a set of familiar yet evolving challenges, redesigning parts of the site to accommodate new elements whilst keeping all the stakeholders happy, preparation of the photos that accompany the articles on the site, the logistics of moving my entire life to SW19 for three weeks. You might think that I would be tired of it by now, the novelty of being a part of such an event having worn off, scuffed away like the logos on the balls. You would be wrong.

I am not a tennis fan per se. Certainly, I can remember the days of Borg, McEnroe, Wade, and King, watching the finals on the television with my parents. It was a tradition, though I don’t know why. I didn't play the game, or follow the sport, so I didn’t watch the matches for any other reason than it was something to do on a Sunday afternoon. But of course I can understand the excitement (sometimes bordering on hysteria) with which some fans greet the event.

Yet despite my 'whatever' attitude to the game, every year I feel it, this excitement. I really don't care about who is playing. What I love are the details. Living life a pixel at a time as I do, I suppose it would have been a fair bet that it would be so. So I guess I approach the tournament with a different sense of anticipation than your average fan. Of course, any excitement I might feel is tempered by the fact that I am here to work, and the hours we do are long enough to dull the fervour of even the most ardent of fans.

Details. Moments. One of my favorites is the bullet-time when the ball is suspended at the very apex of its hand-launched flight, the player beneath it reaching up, up, up towards it in an almost reverent gesture, frozen between coiled and uncoiled, and all is quiet, serene. To the untrained eye, such as mine, each serve looks pretty much the same as the next. It is only when I look at the photos that I can see the nuances, how one player reaches higher than another, one crouches lower than all. That moment, when most eyes are on the player, and their eyes are on the ball, is bliss...

... it is almost always shattered by explosive movement as maximum tension in the player is reached and reversed, unleashed in an arcing slicing blur of focused energy, the ball caught in a millisecond long stringed embrace as it deforms and reforms and leaves the racquet in a spinning frenzy just as the player's exertive grunt reaches the ears of the crowd. If you could see a close up of the ball during its flight you would notice that its fur coat is ruffled, luminous yellow hairs standing up like those on your neck during a scary movie, a fuzzy projectile destined to be battered back and forth until it is deemed fit only for purchase in tins of three by queuing fans, and the cry of 'New Balls Please!' echoes round the court.

There are other moments that I love too, and I will talk about them as the tournament progresses. For now I must get back to the preparations for the event. There are pixels to push, photos to prepare. More from me later…