Flag football practice, Cedar Creek, Texas.
A nice example of what happens when you get some pretty light and come prepared. I’d also point to this photo, taken in the middle of a dusty, dry field in the middle of nowhere, Texas, at 10 on a Saturday morning at a practice for a club-level independent kids’ flag football team as a good contrary example for those budding sports photographers who insist that you need to shoot big-time pro or college events to make a portfolio-worthy photograph.

Mike Danton
Sports Illustrated sent me to Halifax, Nova Scotia to spend a little time with Mike Danton–former Canadian junior hockey star, NHL player with the St. Louis Blues, and… former federal prison inmate. After turning his life around, the 30-year old enrolled at St. Mary’s University in Halifax, where he now plays collegiate hockey. The assignment comprised a mix of game action, documentary reportage, and portrait work over the course of three days, but this is my favorite image from the shoot.

Yani Tseng, 2011 Kraft Nabisco Championship
I wrote a little blog post about this here, but just to reiterate: For about 45 minutes in the morning, as the early groups tee off in the first and second rounds of the Kraft-Nabisco Chapmionshiph, you’ll not find better light anywhere in golf than on the second tee tee box of the Dinah Shore course at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, California. Fortunately for me, the pairing and times worked out so that world #1 Yani Tseng came through as the rising sun peered above the trees in the distance, and piped its light straight up the fairway.

Richard Helmstetter
Shot for Sports Illustrated as part of a six-portrait series on innovators in the golf equipment industry. Richard Helmstetter was the creative force behind the Big Bertha, and with it, helped usher in the age of the driver-as-status-symbol and marketing breakthrough–in addition to the more tangible innovations like a bore-through hosel and oversized clubhead. I photographed him at Callaway’s testing facility in Carlsbad, California.

Nelson Cruz, 2011 American League Championship Series
“Chance favors the prepared mind,” Louis Pasteur once said. It also favors the photographer who happens to be in an outside-third base photo well when a right-handed hitting Nelson Cruz walks up to the plate in the tenth inning with the bases loaded in Game 2 of the American League Championship series and delivers a game winning, walk-off, grand slam home run–especially when that photographer makes the decision to put down the 400 mm and shoot loose instead because, well, something exuberant might happen.

Harrison Frazar
PGA Tour golfer Harrison Frazar is one of those middle-of-the-pack guys; never really at the top of the leaderboard but making just enough money every year to give in to the temptation of hanging around on tour. Having gone over a decade without a tournament win, frustrated with his game and sidelined by injuries and painful rehabilitation, he was contemplating retirement when I got to spend a day with him and his family on assignment for Sports Illustrated. One of the most accommodating athletes I’ve ever met, he was generous enough to let me in behind the scenes of everyday life in the Frazar household on a cold February day in Dallas. Later on in June of 2011, he won a tournament in Memphis for a late kick start to his career. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Webb and Dowd Simpson
Golf World magazine sent me to Charlotte to shoot a cover and opener for a feature on Webb Simpson, arguably the best American golfer last season. In addition to portraits of Webb himself, they wanted a shot of him and his wife as well. After trying a few lit portraits, I placed them in front of a window in the grill room at Quail Hollow’s clubhouse. Of late, I’ve early come to appreciate the spontaneity that natural light allows for; usually if you just step back and let your subjects be themselves, without the formality of strobes popping and assistants running everywhere, and focus on your composition and timing, things fall into place.

Hyperwear Ad Campaign
An advertising campaign for a fitness equipment company in Austin, and a shoot that worked pretty much like most of my editorial shoots: A minimum of scouting, art direction and lighting on the fly, adapting to fluid situations, and working within the constraints of a limited location and a tight budget, all while trying to remain relatively unobtrusive and not get in the way of the location’s business or clients. Well, thats the kind of thing I’m used to doing, and that’s the way I’m used to working. My crew (of two) and I set this particular multiple-light shot (1 of 7 different ones we did we did that day, with 5 different models) up in about 15 minutes.

Jack Burke and Dan Jenkins, photographed for Golf World
Jack Burke, the 1956 Masters Champion, is one of my all-time favorite portrait subjects. I’ve photographed him enough times to know that he keeps a leather-bound journal with him, into which he transcribes just about any random thought about golf that comes into his head. It was the basis for a book several years ago, and you can get a good idea for what’s inside of it by just hanging around him for an hour or so; you’re bound to be the recipient of an aphorism or two.

Legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins, on the other hand, was a bit more intimidating. Even though he and I had worked for the same magazine (Golf Digest) for over a decade, we’d never really met. And I was even more nervous about springing an idea I had for the shoot on him at the last minute–namely, a prop of some Chinese food to make light of a situation he’d gotten himself into with an ill-chosen turn of phrase on his twitter stream last year. He’d got a kick out of the idea, though, and played along to perfection.

Jonathan Byrd, 2011 Deutsche Bank Championship
I’ve written before about how much I like to use mirror lenses on a limited basis, and how to take advantage of the very specific criteria that must be met in order to use them to their full effect. It just so happens that TPC Boston, home of the PGA Tour’s Deutsche Bank Championship, has three out of maybe five or six holes on the entire tour where using such a lens can produce the desired results and give quite a different look from that of a standard telephoto lens. One of those holes is the 17th, where I photographed Jonathan Byrd on the tee in some nice morning backlight.

Ben Crane
A Sports Illustrated feature assignment on a normally low-key golfer who for some odd reason has decided to invent a zany You-Tube persona (the red neoprene suit and crash helmet being the trademarks of that alter-ego), and who also happens to be consistently horrible when it comes to playing the British Open. I hadn’t spoken to him before the shoot, and I was a little nervous about whether or not he’d want to poke so much fun at himself. When he answered the door and asked a) if I’d managed to find a kilt and b) if I wouldn’t mind waiting a second while he went to the locker room to fetch his pink shoes and socks, I knew we’d be having a little fun with things.

Let’s face it, everyone needs a gimmick. There. I said it. You know what I’m talking about. Every now and then someone comes along and is considered “innovative” because they took a fresh approach to something. A tilt-shift lens, perhaps. Maybe a Lensbaby. Infrared. Ring lights. These things go in cycles. There’s really nothing “innovative” about them–they’ve been around for years; in reality somebody just had the good sense to recognize that they were collecting dust on the collective shelf of photography, and they were the re-trailblazers, if you will, who trotted them out. Again. Especially in my part of the business–sports photography–this return to more basic equipment and/or gimmickry, for lack of a better word, is almost necessary if you are to set yourself apart: in this day and age of just about anyone with an autofocus telephoto lens and a digital camera body calling themselves a “sports photographer,” and anyone with a computer and a high-sped internet connection able to disseminate the resultant mediocre pictures and call themselves a “wire service,” we’re always looking for something to make our pictures a little different. Hey, I’m not immune to it, either. So here’s my contribution to dusting off the old equipment shelf: manual-focus catadioptric reflex, or mirror, lens.

I know, I know. Mirror lenses are nothing new. In fact, they’ve probably been around longer than most any other telephoto design. Hell, they’ve been around longer than me. But like tilt-shift lenses and Lensbabies before them, just because people have been using them for years doesn’t mean they aren’t still worth taking for a spin every now and then. But just like those other tools, ubiquitous overuse can make images made using them a visual cliche very quickly.

It’s in this area that the mirror lens has an advantage: unlike some of its other “innovative” counterparts, the physical parameters that lend themselves to the use of a mirror lens are very limiting. That in itself should be enough to prevent their overuse. Anyone can slap on a Lensbaby to shoot an overall of a ballpark, or a tilt-shift during a portrait session, and immediately wind up with something “different” (not necessarily better, mind you, but different…) but the same can’t be said for taking a traditional telephoto off of the camera and replacing it with a mirror. Sure, they’ll give you similar angles of view, depth-of-field, and that compressed, telephoto look, but you won’t be able to achieve the signature effect of the mirror lens that makes it truly different– the “donut” background elements–unless certain physical conditions are met. And with that in mind, here they are:

1. Background: Generally speaking, the higher the contrast and more differentiated the colors therein, the better your chances of creating those rings are. Trees work well, as do crowds. But beyond that, one of the essential ingredients for creating that differentiation is…

2. Back light: The lower, the better, of course, but regardless, the sun coming in from behind the background will create much more contrast between highlights and shadows–and it will also help to separate your subject from the background.. It is that contrast which is necessary for the mirror lens to do its thing. Have a look at the two photos below for a side-by-side comparison of what happens to out of focus elements in back light versus front light. They were taken the same location (the 17th tee at TPC Boston), from pretty much the exact same position and distance (both images are uncropped) on the same day–only the one on the left was shot in the morning, when the sun was behind the player, and the one on the right was shot front-lit in the afternoon. Notice the marked difference in the background.

3. Subject-background distance: One thing mirror lenses have going for them is an extremely shallow depth of field. This makes it very easy to throw the background out of focus–but in order to get the desired effect, the background needs to be way, way out. The farther your subject is from the background, the more pronounced your rings will become. But there’s another element involved with that, and that is…

4. Camera-subject distance: Since depth of field also varies with camera-to-subject distance, it also stands to reason that the closer your subject is to you relative to the background, the better your results will be. Look at the shot of pitcher C.J. Wilson again. I didn’t exactly grab a tape measure, but a good guess (based on the dimensions of a baseball field) is that he’s about 100 feet from my position in the photo well at Rangers Ballpark in Arlington. And (again, an educated guess) is that he’s about 300 feet from the right field stands. That gives us roughly a 1:3 ratio of camera-to-subject-to-background. If you were to express it in graphic form, it would look something like this:

Just right. About a 1:4 ratio of camera-subject and subject-background distance helps the mirror lens do its thing.

Too close: Having your background right up against your subject turns the mirror lens into just another, harder to use and not-quite-as-sharp telephoto with a bunch of weird stuff in the background.

So what happens if you reverse the ratios? Have a look at this golf picture (ignore the front-lit aspect for a moment). In it, my subject is still about 100 feet away, but the trees in the background are much closer–25 feet, at best. The ratio reverses; now we’re at about 4:1, and look what happens to those donuts: Smaller. Much (and pretty much worthlessly) smaller.

And if you were to move the camera say, 250 feet away from the subject and keep him 25 feet away from the background? I can’t show you visually because I never even think a picture like that is worth taking with this lens. The rings are nonexistent.

5. Other considerations: Mirror lenses are, of course, notoriously slow. If you’re heeding the advice above, and back-lighting your subject, you can see where this is going already. Shooting backlit with an f8 lens requires either a low shutter speed or a high ISO, and when you’re shooting action, the low shutter speed won’t cut it.  So the first thing you need is a camera with good high-ISO quality; my exposures for these pictures are in the range of 1/640 f8 at ISO 800 or 1000.

But even at that speed, motion is still going to be a problem. I use mirrors for what we like to call “On-field portraits” a lot, or a wait until there’s a moment where even an athlete seems to stop moving for a brief second. For the action itself, golfers are ideal because they generally keep their heads still at impact, but even some of the best don’t stay completely still. And you’ve still got a 500mm lens in your hands, so camera shake is an issue as well. So it’s also important to either use a monopod or brace the camera on the ground. I like to use a mini bean-bag with a tripod thread for this, as you’ll see later. But no matter what, don’t kid yourself: These things are hard to use, and they’re next to impossible to shoot solid action with. I have an enormous amount of respect for the guys who did it 40 years ago. But if you’re expecting to produce follow-focus, peak action shots with 40 year-old technology that can compare adequately to today’s advanced autofocus lenses, you’re going to be disappointed, no matter how good you are. Don’t overdo it, and don’t overuse it. Save these lenses for situations where they can truly produce something different.

So, putting it all together, what can we glean from all of this? Maximizing the effectiveness of a mirror lens in sports photography (or, in my mind, even using it at all) requires a harmonic convergence, of sorts, of several key elements: A backlit environment, a mottled background, extended subject-to-background distance, and a camera to subject distance that, when coupled with the subject-to background distance, produces a ratio that will yield the desired effect.

That’s pretty much a long-winded way of saying that, in order for a mirror to work, a lot of stuff has to come together. So it’s easy to understand why this lens works in only very, very few situations. Which is a good thing. Because it pretty much guarantees it won’t get overused, relegated to the dust-bin of photography fads that were the “in thing” for about 3 months and then disappeared.. Or at least, we can hope.

The setup:

Left: Carl Zeiss 1000mm Mirotar. Right: Nikkor 500mm f8.

I use two mirrors regularly–a 500mm f8 Reflex Nikkor that’s probably about 25 years old–I don’t know, I bought it used, just as had I bought my three previous ones. They’re prone to fungal infestation, and a lot of the earlier ones were, shall we say, not prone to sharpness, so it’s not uncommon to go through two or three until you find one you like. But at around $200 each on the used market, it’s not really something to worry about.

The Ungainly Beast: Zeiss 1000mm f5.6 Mirotar

The other lens I like to use is a rarity–a Carl Zeiss 1000mm f 5.6 Mirotar that I never even knew existed until I asked Mel Levine, the former equipment stockroom guru at Sports Illustrated, for the magazine’s Canon 1200mm 5.6 one day and, with that unavailable, he offered me this in its stead. I learned very quickly that this was no replacement–it weighs about 60 pounds, is a manual focus lens and, at that, utilizes bellows focusing–literally sliding the camera (and therefore, the film plane) back and forth to achieve focus. My Google research indicated that there were only 23 of these things ever manufactured, with the last one made in 1963. When Mel told me about it, it had been collecting dust in the back of the stockroom for years–with good reason. Nevertheless, I decided to give it a whirl. It redefines the idea of a “limited application” lens. Next to impossible to focus, heavy enough to induce camera shake on the most solid of tripods, and massive enough to warrant its own custom-made wheeled, hard-sided shipping case, this is not the kind of lens you just drag out for a stroll in the park. It’s a lens that requires planning, looking for a single shot and being patient–and being willing to chimp through dozens of out of focus images until you finally get one you’re happy with. Here’s a shot of the Texas Rangers’ C.J. Wilson made with it (and yes, it’s full frame):

As for my camera itself, I’m a Canon guy, so I get a few odd looks when people see a Nikon lens on a Canon body. But the fact is there are far more readily-available Nikon reflexes on the used market, and it’s a lot easier to adapt a Nikon F mount to Canon EF than it is a Canon FD one. If you go to www.cameraquest.com you can price out a hand-machined, glassless F-to-EF adapter; that’s what I use. The other problem to overcome is focus. The stock screens that come with any camera today–Nikon, Canon, whatever–don’t cut it. They’re not really intended for manual-focus applications–at least, not to the extent that their predecessors in, say, the Nikon F2 or Canon F1 (the top-end cameras around back when these lenses were current) were.  You’re going to need all the help you can get; to that end I’d recommend replacing your standard issue p.o.s. focusing screen with one made by Brightscreen. They’re pricey (about $275 or so) but well worth it. My 5D Mark II has one in there for just that reason. Finally, a word or two about sharpness. Now that you’ve gotten your camera dialed in to get the thing in focus, it’d be a shame to lose the shot because of things like flare and/or motion blur–and you;re setting yourself up for both if you’ve heeded my advice and are shooting backlit. So grab some black wrap and gaffer’s tape and improvise an extended hood. And shell out the $25 or so for a beanbag camera support. You’ll be glad you did.

My typical golf setup: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Angle Finder C, Nikkor 500mm f 8 lens with F-to-EF adapter, beanbag, and a highly technical shade--a piece of black foil taped and shaped to make an extended lens hood.

So there you have it. Mirror lenses in a nutshell. Now get out there, play around a bit, and have some fun with these relics. Just don’t overdo it.

If there are milestones in a sports photographer’s career, I’m pretty sure covering your first World Series would be one of them. I was positively giddy when I got two simple words in an e-mail from Sports Illustrated picture editor Nate Gordon the day after the Rangers won the American League pennant: “You’re in.” After covering countless Rangers games in Arlington over the years, the league championship series both this year and last (and missing out on last year’s World Series because of a scheduling conflict), I was finally on my way to the Fall Classic.

There were four of us in Arlington for the magazine, each with our assigned duties. Mine was to stay in the outfield, between the foul poles, and work on feature and loose compositions for possible opening spreads and covers. I also had an assigned position out in center field from which to shoot straight action; thanks to the ingenuity of Rangers’ PR man John Blake and the perseverance of MLB Photos photo boss Rich Pilling, a new position was created for a couple of photographers with a much lower angle than the regular-season spot at the top of the hill in center. It was a great place to shoot from and yielded some interesting angles on plays in the infield.

I don’t cover a lot of night baseball–during the regular season, unless there’s some overbearing necessity to the game like a feature story on a starting pitcher or something, it’s pretty pointless. It was kind of nice to be able to wander about the ballpark during pre-game, whether it was shooting pictures of the Cardinals’ pitchers throwing long-toss in the outfield as I set up a remote down the left field line, or Rangers’ manager Ron Washington throwing batting practice, and take advantage of the golden afternoon light peeking through the nooks and crannies of Rangers Ballpark that doesn’t normally coincide with game times in Arlington, and it was a real challenge and testament to the high-ISO capabilities of today’s DSLRs (in my case, the Canon Mark IV) to be able to shoot with the necessary long glass (a 600mm f4, with a big assist to the Wimberley tripod head) out in the center field position as that gorgeous light turned to darkness and, as is the case with just about any baseball game where Tony LaRussa is involved, we all settled in for a bunch of very late nights.

Nate and I discussed the picture he was looking for–low angle, wide, yet still a bit from the front if at all possible. Of course, you can’t be out on the field shooting when the players are running on to it, so I suggested mounting the camera on a ballhead, and then on a monopod, and using the monopd as a boom. Just before the Rangers took the field, I extended the monopod and shoved the camera out on to the warning track, firing it with a release cord. The previous day’s rainout had afforded me the chance to go to the park and set my angles, focus, and mark the position where I needed to be to make it happen, so it wasn’t a wasted day. Before the game, Nate told me they were holding the space open for that picture to open the story. No pressure, right? In the middle of the 4th inning I got a text from him telling me the shot was a success and that it was indeed running as the opener. That was a load off of my mind, and it allowed me to relax a bit and get into the rhythm of the rest of the game.

The rest of the game lasted another 3 hours, with the Rangers eventually winning on the walk-off by Cruz. Nate and I had discussed the importance of giving the pictures from the ALCS a sense of place, so I decided to pull back and shoot the potential winning hit loose, using a Canon EOS 1D Mark IV (with a special thanks to Jerry Ward and Bob Malash at Canon USA in Dallas for the loaner!) and a 70-200mm f4 lens. It was way too late to make it in the magazine, but it did get into the iPad edition, which isn’t a bad thing, either.

As always, my favorite event of the year did not disappoint. Just the right amount of wind, rain, and cold weather to remind me what tournament golf should be all about. The Masters has its awe-inspiring beauty, the U.S. Open its adrenaline-pumping energy and gravitas, but for raw, grinding golf at its purest, nothing comes close to a British Open. It makes for some rough going for the players, to be sure, but also from a photography standpoint–I was only half joking when I told some colleagues that Royal St. George’s might be the only course that photographs better in crappy weather. The flat, treeless linksland on the Kent coast isn’t much for scenic backdrops, so you have to make do with what you can; adapting to and taking advantage of shifting, sometimes fleeting, light and conditions to illustrate your point and instill a sense of place. Oh, and there was action going on as well, capped off by Darren Clarke’s victory. Following his group all day on Saturday brought with it a very odd side effect: trudging along in the wind and rain in the afternoon, it didn’t hurt to have a few thousand people screaming, “Come on, Darren!” to help keep me going. But enough of that for now. After five straight weeks of golf (not that I’m complaining–just that I’m worn out!) London beckons outside my hotel window, and it’s time to enjoy a couple of days of downtime in one of my favorite cities.

What a week. And I don’t mean the win by Rory McIlroy–incredible as it was–at Congressional Country Club outside Washington, D.C. at last week’s U.S. Open Championship. I mean covering a U.S. Open, but doing it in a different way–for a different client, with a different mindset, and doing it in near-real time.

For the first time, I was working at this year’s Open for the United States Golf Association, which puts on the championship, rather than for one of my magazine clients, which made for a huge difference in how I had to approach the assignment. Images of the event, its surroundings, personnel, and overall environment were just as important as the action going on inside the ropes. With that in mind, I worked as part of a team comprising seven photographers (as opposed to the usual three or four) and seven editors (as opposed to the usual one or two), working a week-long succession of 14- to 16-hour days to create a comprehensive record of the event. Hard work, to be sure, and certainly more physically demanding that a lot of other golf assignments I’ve had. But in the end, well worth it. I couldn’t have worked with a nicer bunch of people, and we all walked away feeling like we had accomplished something pretty innovative, because, well, we had.

Teaming up with the folks at Canon, who armed us each with a couple of EOS 1D-Mark IV cameras equipped with WFT-E2A wireless transmitters, all seven photographers were able to transmit from the course over a 4G network, using the camera’s “Set” button to send images from anywhere on the course to the editors back in the media center. Coupled with a platform created exclusively for the USGA by IBM, we were able to post, in what we liked to call “near real-time” images about 5 minutes after they were taken, in a synchronous time line on the USGA website each day. Pretty cool stuff indeed; to our knowledge nothing of this magnitude had been tried at an event like this (not to mention over distances like this), let alone with as much success as we managed to achieve. I was proud to be a part of it.

One more thing, as a sort of “by the way” item. You’ll notice in my main gallery above that there’s a dearth of pictures of guys actually playing golf. I know. I meant to do that. But every now and then I’ll get an e-mail from one or two (of my three or four) readers asking why I don’t show more “normal” golf pictures. We have a nickname for those–we like to call them “neck and steel” pictures: stuff that’s pretty much de rigeur out there for someone who shoots golf day in and day out. In so doing, though, it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees, and eliminate the obvious. So while I’m still reluctant to intersperse things like that in a “best of” type gallery of images, I’ve put a few of my favorites from last week down below.

It’s one of those times when as a golf photographer, you’re going to second guess yourself no matter what. For me, it all came down to the fact that I knew Glover had hit a bad tee shot on 18 and was all but guaranteed par or worse, that Byrd had played one-over golf all day and was due for a birdie, and that he had two holes left in which to do it. As Byrd walked to the green, staring at a tricky up-and-down, my phone buzzed with a text from a golf writer friend, watching on TV. Its contents didn’t inspire confidence in my decision to stick around.

“My money is on Geico,” it said.

It was enough to make me spend the next couple of minutes chuckling so hard to myself that I could barely stay steady enough to shoot the chip–which Byrd hit to about six feet. He proceeded to hole his par putt, and then drill his tee shot on 18 into some perfect light on the fairway, setting up not only a really cool picture of his approach, but an improbable birdie putt that, in addition to forcing a playoff, also inspired a mouth-agape roar and fist pump usually reserved for that guy in the Sunday red shirt who used to be number one in the world.

But still, the Caveman pulled it off. Byrd sent his tee shot on the first playoff hole into a bunker, his next to within inches of the hazard line to the left of the green, and yet somehow managed to stop his downhill tight-lie, over-water, uphill pitch on the green. It just wasn’t close enough, and when he missed his par putt, he left Glover with two putts to win. Lucas gave us a good show though, leaving his third shot just short enough to be just long enough to increase the collective pucker factor of spectators and players alike. But as he rolled it in, he calmly raised his left fist in a celebration that betrayed about a hundred times more reactive emotion than the head-down, hand-up salute that followed his US Open victory at Bethpage Black. What was it he said to the kid in that Nike ad? “It was just a three-footer, pal.” Well, so was this.

I love this golf course. I’d never been, and I hope to go back every year from now on. It’s old-school, the kind you don’t see very many of anymore in this day of cookie cutter, TPC Build-On-Your-Lot courses. Tall, ancient trees, rolling hills, beautiful backgrounds and a commingling of light and shadow that you only get on tour these days at courses like Colonial and Riviera, Aronimink and Muirfield Village. The course lets a photographer play; it gives you backgrounds that work with mirror lenses and short telephotos alike, elevation changes and gallery roping that doesn’t restrict you to one shot, and lets you move with the light. In short, it’s perfect for pictures.

And finally, a brief side note that will come as a shock to anyone who knows me and is reading this: The marshals were fantastic. At one point on Thursday, one of them asked me a question and, so sure was I that I wasn’t hearing him properly, I had to ask him to repeat the question three times before I understood that he was actually asking me where he should stand so as to be out of my way. That same afternoon, another sauntered over from his tee box position two dozen yards away for the sole purpose of handing me an unrequested bottle of water from the “players only” cooler. These are things that just are not done at “normal” PGA Tour events. What a great bunch of people. The cynic in me says that that will all change once the PGA of America gets hold of them for the 2017 PGA Championship (when it comes to dealing with photographers, marshals at the PGA Championship are far and away the nastiest, most pompous and officious group of people you’ll ever meet, and more than one of them has told me that that’s how the PGA of America trains them to be), but I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

Until then, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Sports Illustrated will send me back again next year.

…and for the photographically inclined…

Sunny versus overcast? Ten minutes’ difference. Have a look at these two images, shot on the same tee box (the 12th), ten minutes apart. The one of Phil Mickelson was in screaming early-morning sunlight; by the time Dustin Johnson showed up in the next group, clouds had rolled in. No Photoshop here, folks, just changing lighting conditions and a commensurate shift in exposure.

Mirror lens heaven. I’ve written about it before, but there are just a very few times you can take advantage of locations on some courses to make this optical dinosaur work. It takes a unique combination of back light, inconsistent backgrounds, and a particular subject-to-background distance to pull it off, but Quail Hollow’s third tee fit the bill perfectly in the afternoon. Here are examples shot with one (a 500mm f8 Reflex-Nikkor
adapted for Canon with a Nikon-to-EF adapter from CameraQuest.com on a 5D Mark II) and without (a Canon 400mm f2.8 LII on an EOS 1D Mark III).

We had a bit of “interesting” before the cut out at TPC San Antonio, what with Kevin Na’s 16 on the ninth hole on Thursday (don’t look for it here, I was chasing leaders on the back nine) and a wee gale on Friday. Live in the Texas Hill Country long enough and you’ll come to appreciate what it means when a north wind blows in; what it meant on Friday was that a long, bland, golf course with tricked-out greens turned into an absolute monster. Scores blew up; J.J. Henry, your leader at five under after the first round and a Texas boy who knows how to play in the wind, soared to 1 over playing a course that was designed for a prevailing southerly breeze, with greens that were never intended to accept knocked down, under-the-wind rifle shots. The leaderboard was a mess, with golfers jumping on and off with each fresh howl of the norther, and yours truly was never quite sure who to follow in his quest to ensure having a picture of the leader come sundown. One person easy to eliminate from the mix was the golf photographers’ favorite, Mike Weir, who left for home with the low-Canadian trophy on Friday after a 79-83 put him at +18.

Things settled down over the weekend, though, and once you made the mile-long trek from the media center to the course, the golf was pretty good. Sunday’s final group of Three Guys You’ve Never Heard Of Unless You Cover The Nationwide Tour–Cameron Tringale, Steele, and Kevin Chappell–had the assembled masses in the media center scratching their heads, and it was the collective, expert opinion of all five of us present that we’d have to concern ourselves with them for about two holes before we ran off to catch up with the Charley Hoffman-Rich Beem-Adam Scott threesome, as the winner would surely come from there. Shows you how much we know. Brandt Snedeker, one group back, wound up giving us a scare; Scott, probably out of fear of repeating last year’s unsuccessful attempt at donning the winner’s pair of cowboy boots, went backwards, and the aforementioned Mr. Steele (he of the nerves and resolve) held on for a one-stroke victory over Chappell and Hoffman (See? We were almost right!).

As for those cowboy boots… Steele got them on all right, after a bit of tugging, wincing, and grunting. He hoisted the trophy, and then deadpanned the line of the week.

“Do I get a horse, too?”

Well, no. But a Masters invite, a pair of custom Luccheses and a cool 1.1 mil isn’t anything to sneeze at. And besides, the horse thing is overrated. Trust me.

So when Golf World magazine assigned me to shoot a portrait of Dan Jenkins, I knew I didn’t have to worry about the sense of humor thing. For those of you not familiar with Dan’s in particular, he’s earned a well-deserved reputation for an acerbic wit that’s been honed over the course of a sixty-year writing career–in newspapers and magazines (The Dallas Times Herald, Sports Illustrated, Golf Digest), and in books (Dead Solid Perfect, Semi Tough)–and backed up by the simple fact that when you’re 81 years old and one of the world’s greatest living sportswriters, you really don’t have to answer to anyone or give a damn about kowtowing to their sensitivities. Lately he’s also become an accomplished twitterer (tweeter?), regularly spinning 140-character one-liners for Golf Digest (which owns Golf World), for which he also writes a monthly column.

There was one tweet in particular, though, that raised a few eyebrows… The 2010 Masters, South Korea’s Y.E. Yang is moving up the leaderboard, and then, from Dan’s lips to the Twittersphere’s ears…

“Y.E. Yang is only three shots off the lead. I think we got takeout from him last night.”

And so began a shit-storm of political correctness (or incorrectness, depending on your point of view) of exactly the kind that you’d expect in these days of heightened sensitivity (or insensitivity, depending on your point of view).

I’d met Dan once or twice before; we shared a house at the British Open one year and ran into each other in an airport or two coming back from tournaments, but I certainly didn’t know him well, and was a little intimidated. So we chatted a little. Talked about tweeting and technology and all that other stuff. Later on, we’d talk about what it was like to cover the great Texas teams of the ’60s, and about barbecue and about why Fort Worth is a great place to live and why Dallas absolutely sucks (and all the while, I would be mentally pinching myself to double-check that I was really standing in Dan Jenkins’ kitchen, talking to Dan Jenkins about Darrell Royal and Railhead Barbecue and why Dallas sucks). But before we got to that point, while he was still sitting at his desk, I finally got up the courage to broach the subject and just ask him flat-out if he’d like to have a little fun with the rest of the shoot. I told him what I had in mind. I told him what was in the front seat.

He leaned back in his chair and thought about it for a barely second. I’d like to think that I even detected a little mischievous grin. “Yeah, I’ll do it,” he said. “You know, some people just don’t have a sense of humor.”









—–

* The film part of the shoot was done with two Linhof Technikas (a Master Technika with a 240mm f5.6 Schneider/Linhof, and a Technika III with a 135mm f5.6 Schneider/Linhof) on TXP-320 film.The digital side of the take was shot with a Canon EOS-5D MarkII and 85mm f1.2 lens; black-and-white conversions were done in Adobe Lightroom.

** The pun went unnoticed at the time I placed the order. I feel pretty stupid about that.

Nervous as I was, the chance of my golf photography career going up in flames in the desert was mitigated somewhat by…what was that crap falling out of the sky again? SNOW? Yes indeed. 40-degree temperatures and high winds that sent me scurrying to REI for some mittens on Friday gave way to a 10-minute snow delay on Sunday as the white stuff pelted the fourth fairway to the point of unplayability. You don’t see that every day.

Sunday’s weather affected Saturday, too, as Tour officials decided to try and cram two rounds into one day, pushing tee times up to 7:10 a.m. Normally this is something I’d be inclined to groan about, were it not for the unintended consequence of being able to shoot some pictures, quite literally, at first light–even if that first light happened to be coming off the front end of a golf cart in a harried attempt to permit Ryan Moore, who arrived on the range just after I did at 6:05, to actually see what–but certainly not where–he was hitting. The schedule earlier in the week had tee times starting just late enough to miss the half-hour or so of golden morning sun, instead leaving us stuck with the cold, harsh desert light that turns things ugly rather quickly, so it was nice to be able to get out and make a few early morning pictures at least once.

Being in the desert, with most matches running right through high noon, doesn’t afford the opportunity for pretty stock images, and if there’s anything I’ve leaned about this tournament in the five years it’s been out at Dove Mountain, it’s this: you have to pick your spots, and get your pictures wherever you can find them. Players in trouble and images with a sense of place trump the waist-up “neck-and-steel” shots that are the golf photographer’s workaday staple; the saving grace to having an event on a very un-picturesque course, in really bad light, and with awful backgrounds is that it forces you to think outside the box and look for things that you might otherwise miss if you were shooting a “normal” golf tournament. In other words, it forces you to bring your “A” game (even if Tiger whatshisname, once again, didn’t bring his), and gives you a fighting chance–even if you did show up with that knife…

(Now, for those of you who are photographically inclined, some tidbits that might interest you…)

New Toy: The week marked my professional debut of the Samsung TL500. After my Canon G9 crapped out on me about 2 months ago, I knew I was going to have to find a replacement which would allow me to shoot top-of-the-backswing photos from close in behind the tee. Not that this is a normal occurrence; I can probably count on one hand the number of times having a camera like this comes in handy per round, and I can usually count on one finger the number of frames it actually yields in the final edit. But when you need it, you need it. I was all set to plunk down the $500 for a G12 until I found a SportsShooter.com thread that mentioned the TL500. I’d never heard of it before, but the Schneider (yes, THAT Schneider) 24-70mm 1.8 lens piqued my interest, and after a bit more research, I was sold. One thing they might want to add to the manual, though: even when you have the thing set to be totally, completely silent, it still lets out a cell phone-like double “ping” when the battery is breathing its last gasps of life. And in keeping with Murphy’s Law, you (okay, make that “I”) will inevitably stumble upon this discovery for the first time not before a golfer tees it up, and not after he’s hit his shot, but the very second he stands over his ball at address.

My, What Long Arms You Have: Look, I know the “rule” is an arm’s length from the ropes. Fine. I get it. But I also get that sometimes it’s not practical. So yes (and I’m not giving away any state secrets here…) sometimes we golf shooters cheat a little bit. Or maybe even a lot. But the mark of a good, experienced photographer is knowing when and where it’s okay, and how to do it. And around the green, when you’re getting into other people’s pictures, so blissfully unaware of the fact that you’re practically sitting in the middle of the freakin’ fairway, is not when, where, or how to do it. I don’t care what your picture looks like.

Shameless Plug Department: It was sunny. It was snowing. It was sunny. It was raining. Shot the whole final on Sunday with rain covers on and didn’t miss a thing or feel unduly burdened in any way. The Think Tank Hydrophobia covers are the best things out there, bar none. Spend the money. You get what you pay for.

Favorite Picture Of The Week: Ben Crane, you seem like a really nice guy, and your You Tube videos are pretty funny. But the pace of play thing still leaves a lot of us scratching our heads…