It was quite a busy week out in the desert, with a variety of assignments to keep me busy, all of them centered around the Phoenix Open. It started on Wednesday with a portrait shoot of golfer Ryan Moore for Sports Illustrated.

I joked with friends that I should have gone out and bought a lottery ticket after calling Ryan to set up our shoot. Ryan is a fantastic guy, one of the refreshing few on tour who is a genuine pleasure to work with and who understands what a photographer needs from a shoot and is willing to put in the time and effort to make it happen. As we’d worked together before a few years ago, I knew all of that, but that still didn’t stop my jaw from hitting the floor when he a) actually answered his phone on the second ring and b) asked, “What day works best for you?” If you haven’t guessed already those are not two things you often experience when trying to work with a professional athlete.

Thursday was my first look at TPC Scottsdale in a year. It always amazes me how the infamous 16th hole there grows–the skyboxes and bleachers seem to multiply exponentially. But this year Golf World writer Geoff Shackelford was concentrating on a different hole–the far more strategic 17th, and my task for that day was to make an image showing not just action but the layout of the hole and illustrating the decision making process which faced the player on this drive-able par 4. It didn’t hurt that as the day went on the harsh desert light settled down a bit so that by the time Phil Mickelson approached the tee, most of the tee box was in shadow, allowing him and his wisely-chosen bright blue shirt to stand out.

Friday and Saturday were my days to work on a new project for Golf World involving the Gigapan process (more on my work with that here). The high resolution and user-interactive potential of the images made from it make it a natural for the 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale, one of the most crowded, and certainly the loudest and rowdiest, holes in all of professional golf. Thanks to the benevolence of a security guard who bore a striking resemblance to the Sopranos’ Big Pussy Bonpensiero, I was able to find a perch in the penthouse skybox overlooking the green, and came away with this 17-gigabyte monster of a panorama, comprising 720 individual images stitched together:

Sunday was back to the golf–enough lounging around in the corporate tents! TPC Scottsdale is a hard course to shoot, with few clean backgrounds and even fewer shortcut opportunities when chasing leaders around the course, and I never like to only devote one day to actual game coverage but in this case I didn’t have much of a choice. After a relatively peaceful front nine of following the two lead groups all hell broke loose, with Hunter Mahan, Y.E. Yang, and Rickie Fowler puling away from the pack and putting themselves in positions to win. Naturally, they were all playing in separate threesomes. So after much running around I settled on Mahan, who did me the courtesy of hanging on for the win.