Tips for tennis photography with Nikon D3100?

I'm going to a tennis event tomorrow (Nov. 4), and I need some tips for taking great pictures. I'm a tennis player and I play and train everyday for 4-5 hours, so I do understand the game completely. But I'm still a beginner with my Nikon D3100 and don't completely understand the settings I can put it in to take great photos of tennis! Also, the tennis court will be indoors, if that changes anything?

Getting dynamic sports shots can be tough with the 18-55 type kit lens, not quite "long" enough in some settings. A 55-200 type range would let you move in closer optically - without getting closer to the court.

I think the D3100 has a preset for Sports - try that, to help with exposure until you get more comfortable with exposure settings.

Also try panning with the action - easier to do with a longer lens. Takes practice. See link.

Here the way I explain exposure to beginners.
Photography is kind of like baking bread, two factors, time and temperature. The shutter is time of course, and the f-stop setting in the lens is the temperature. You balance the two settings to find the right amount for the given amount of available light and the effect you want in the final image. Slow shutter speeds will give motion blur and high speeds freeze action with a sharper look. With the f- stop setting, a small iris with give more depth of field, wide f-stops will give shallow depth of fielf, good for people photos to soften the background. Have fun.

Where to start!

There's no single set of settings that will get you great results, if only it were that simple.

So starting with the lighting. The fact that the event is indoors will make things much more tricky, it may seem bright to you, but to your camera it's going to look dark. That will almost certainly mean boosting the ISO setting on your camera as high as you are willing to accept - I say accept because high ISO settings will dramatically degrade image quality.

Because tennis is a high speed game I would be looking to use your lenses at f/2.8-f/4 or with the minimum f/number if they won't go that low. Personally I would then be looking to use a shutter speed of 1/200s of faster, if necessary SLIGHTLY under-exposing the images to to get the shutter speed high enough.

The next part is perhaps the most difficult. Think about where you are going to try and take the images from for the most dramatic effect. Square on, and looking down may be great as a spectator, but it's rubbish for creating memorable shots. Instead you need to be low down at or towards the ends of the court, ideally looking diagonally across the court, and you need to be able move. As you are training I'd suggest you have a look at the photos in publications that you like, and figure out where they were taken from around the court.