You can follow along with my daily updates from the British Open in the Travels section, so for the photographically inclined we’ll just move right to the pictures.

The knock on the Old Course is that it’s beautiful to play (indeed it is), it’s chock full of history and therefore an Open there automatically has some magical undertones (it does), but from a photographic perspective it is, in local parlance, pure shite. Sacrilegious as it may sound, that, too, is the absolute truth. It’s not too much of a stretch to say that, with the flat terrain and the unfortunate placement of TV cranes, scaffolds, and grandstands, it’s one of the ugliest golf courses for pictures, once you get past the first and 18th holes. And with its classic out-and-back layout, the fairways are always roped to one side (the outside) only, leaving too long of a throw to opposite holes and to most greens. But hey, you do what you can, right? Someone once told me that a photographer’s job is to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. And so it is here.

The real challenge of the week, though, was to produce this Gigapan image of the 18th hole. It was photographed from the balcony of the MacDonald Rusacks Hotel with a big assist both from the hotel’s management and Golf Digest Director of Photography Christian Iooss. More specifics can be found on my Sunday blog post, but here it is: