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.

I’m planning on putting together a little behind-the-scenes piece on my week of being a part of the USGA photo team at this year’s U.S Open Championship later on this week–once I’ve had time to edit a couple thousand pictures, gather my thoughts, and recover from one of the most physically demanding weeks I’ve ever experienced covering golf. But until then, enjoy my favorites from the last nine holes of yesterday’s final round and Rory McIlroy’s historic victory.

I enjoy covering the LPGA. I really do. People generally raise an eyebrow when I tell them that, and I have to explain to them that the LPGA is everything that the PGA Tour is not–down-to-earth and laid back; the players (for the most part) are more approachable and their demeanor (for the most part) more relaxed than their male counterparts, and overall the atmosphere is more conducive to enjoying and appreciating golf at its highest levels as an on-course spectator. The media folks are great, bending over backwards to be helpful. I want to see this tour make it. Sometimes, however, I worry that the tour’s success is going to have to come in spite of itself.

The Sybase Match Play should be such a great event, and for the most part it is. It boasts the top 64 golfers on tour (give or take), a great golf course for match play–Hamilton Farm GC–with a risk-reward par 5 finishing hole that unfortunately, due to the format, doesn’t come into play often enough, and a low-key, fan friendly atmosphere early in the week that should have people coming out in droves. You caught the use of the word “should” up at the top of this paragraph, right? With so much going for it, how does something turn out to be so, well, blah? Simple: a weekend featuring stone faces, glacial pace of play, and a schedule that leaves you scratching your head.

While I know that the fire burns hot internally for both Cristie Kerr and Suzann Pettersen, the two combatants in Sunday afternoon’s final match, I have never seen two people who appeared more outwardly disinterested in the prospect of playing a round of golf for $375,000. I know, I know, this is not about what I see, this is about them, about competing, about winning, about having their “game face” on. Not everyone can be Christina Kim or Paula Creamer, right? Not so fast. It’s also about giving people a reason to watch, about drawing them in to the product you’re presenting. Well I’ve got news for you: The product they’re presenting, as a whole (and I’m not just talking about hitting golf shots) is turning people off. Witness one fan walking next to me as we approached the 18th green in near darkness. “Can you believe,” he said to his wife, “that we’ve been out here since three o’clock? It’s after seven now. Not even I play golf that slow.”

Which brings up another point. I may be able to dismiss the demeanor of the players as simply owing to their well-known competitive natures, but witnessing that seeming disinterest for four hours and ten minutes over an 18-hole match makes the frowns, pursed lips, and barely perceptible body language (save for Pettersen’s two-fisted reach skyward at the last) all the more excruciating. Four hours and ten minutes! That’s nearly fifteen minutes per hole, as a twosome, in match play, where putts are routinely conceded. Something is very much amiss. During Saturday’s morning and afternoon matches, it wasn’t uncommon for consecutive groups to have two holes between them. LPGA officials had an obligation to maintain a decent pace of play, and over the weekend, they didn’t.

What’s the big deal, you say? The big deal is that it’s boring, and that’s a reputation the LPGA can ill afford right now. Over the weekend you had golfers, in what should be the most exciting format there is, plodding along, taking forever to play their shots (under lift-clean-and-place, no less!) with no fear of untoward consequences. People don’t want to come out and see a snooze-fest,* and it sure as hell is not going to hold anyone’s attention on television, especially during Sunday’s final round. There are no other groups to cut to, no other players to walk to another fairway to watch. Only the most hardened hard-core golf fan is going to want to sit through that. Maybe.

The fault falls squarely on the shoulders of those in charge not only of maintaining a decent pace of play, but of those scheduling the event. For example, the first of Friday’s sixteen second-round matches teed off at 11 a.m., despite forecasts for thunderstorms all afternoon, and nowhere to push the schedule back to, with morning and afternoon rounds already scheduled over the weekend. Sunday’s semifinals teed off at 10 in the morning, which guaranteed a start time for the finals after 3:00 p.m. (They started at 3:10). Both times, the LPGA wasted 3 hours of daylight for whatever reason (presumably television, and at that point, the question must be asked, for what size audience?) to finish at roughly 7:20 p.m. If you’re a spectator who’s brought the family out to watch, and you leave as soon as the last putt drops, give yourself half an hour to slog it back to the parking lot on a shuttle bus and sit in traffic getting out of it on the one-lane dirt egress road. And then, since you’re in suburban New Jersey, give it another half an hour (at least) to get home. Now you’re pushing 8:30 (one of them on a school night), and you haven’t even started cooking dinner. Is it worth it to take your kids to watch two joyless individuals slow-play their way around a golf course to get home after dark and get on with life? You think that prospect is going to make a family with young kids want to give up their Saturday or Sunday and head out to watch? But right now, that’s the LPGA’s audience, and while I know the players appreciate the support and any spectator turnout, if last weekend was any indication, it doesn’t seem to matter to the tour’s decision-makers if they stick around or not.

That’s really unfortunate. With the talent and personalities of most of its players, the LPGA has so much to offer. It just needs to work on getting it out there without tripping over itself.

*Want proof? I got a text at one point, as I walked down the thirteenth hole following the pair’s tee shots, asking if there was a decent sized gallery. Having quite a bit of time in between shots (see above), I had a chance to obtain a definitive answer. I had time to count, and to exclude various marshals, TV personnel, and media. “68,” I replied.

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.

As I write this, sitting on my sofa at about 5:30 in the morning on Masters Sunday, many of my friends and colleagues should be just arriving at Augusta National for the annual ritual of lining up by the eighteenth green to reserve a space for this afternoon’s final putt. I say “should,” because it’s been six years now since the place last saw my shadow, and I have no idea if that little tradition still exists. Nothing much ever really changes there, though, so I’m guessing that, in some form or another, it probably does.

My last Masters, in 2005, was also Jake’s first. I had developed a habit of sending him postcards from all of my trips so that one day, when he was old enough to read, or for that matter, know what a postcard is, he’d know where his dad had been and that he was constantly thinking about him on while on the road. It’s a habit that has fallen by the wayside of late, the best of intentions having given way to the demands of time, or of age, or perhaps just plain laziness; maybe it’s “just one of those things” that every first-time parent can identify with that you do with such gusto and commitment when your first child is so very young. I must have sent him hundreds of cards from every place imaginable–too many to count, let alone remember writing. Except the one from the Masters.

There’s a certain serenity that descends over the place on the first Sunday morning of April, an odd quiet that’s part anticipation, part reverence, and partly the realization that this is the last time–at least for a year–that you’ll see it, and so you try to soak it all in. As a photographer, you’ve arrived before dawn to queue near the eighteenth green so that, at eight o’clock sharp, just after the gates open to the public but just before the mass of humanity crests the hill beyond the first tee, you and several hundred of your colleagues and select badge-holders can make what can only be described as an organized scramble to put down a folding chair and claim a position in the first row behind the ropes, guessing on what you think will be the best position to shoot the final putt some eleven hours hence. If you’re like me, you’ll bring a copy of the Sunday New York Times; you’ll introduce yourself to your new-found neighbors, chat with them for a bit, and then, after about an hour or so, leave them with your weightlifter edition and a half-done Sunday Magazine crossword, secure in the knowledge that your chair will be there, miraculously empty and waiting, when you’ve made the final walk up the hill with the last group come evening. That, friends, is truly a tradition like no other.

Then comes the lull. It’s only about nine o’clock, and the leaders won’t tee off until three. Even the first group out won’t go for at least another hour. We had a habit of sitting down to a relaxing, peaceful breakfast (the only one of the week that we’d have time for) in the clubhouse, and then we’d each go off and do our own thing for a while. For me, on that particular Sunday, my thing was to buy a box of postcards in the merchandise shop, and make the long walk down the hill to Amen Corner. Hard behind the twelfth tee stands an enormous grandstand, affording views of the approach and putts on 11, all of 12, and the tee shot on 13. Even though the first group of the day wouldn’t be through for hours, it was already packed with spectators. The last row is reserved for members of the media, and I clambered up, pen and postcard in hand. I settled in to a seat, and wrote Jake his postcard. Told him how I was in a very special place, a place that has colors of green grass and blue sky and pink flowers that somehow don’t exist anywhere else on earth, a place that you have to revere and respect even though it goes against every fiber of your being, a place that you know not many are lucky enough to get to see in person and that you want to remember for the rest of your life. Told him that I hoped that one day we could go back there together. He wasn’t even a year old then, but I knew that one day he’d be old enough to understand.

Of course as I wrote that, I was sure I’d be back the next year, and for years after that. But as everyone in this crazy business knows, it’s a business of changing tastes, of changing relationships, and of changing priorities. There was a time when I used to cringe at the inevitable, ‘Why aren’t you doing the Masters this weekend?” question, because I really didn’t want to get into a discussion of all of that goes into the backside of freelancing: the fact that here are no guarantees–either in the minds of your clients or, for that matter, in your own mind. What was once important, to them and to you, no longer necessarily is, and I’m finally comfortable in being able to explain that to people; in my case, now that Jake is old enough to want to hold a club, the pristine grounds of Augusta National are no match for the Bear Country Golf Driving Range on Highway 71 in Bastrop, Texas. The simple fact of the matter is that I was lucky–very lucky–to have had the opportunity to photograph four Masters; on that last trip in 2005 fortune smiled on me as Tiger Woods spun around 180 degrees from where he “should” have been to celebrate his victory, right at me, sitting in the chair I’d left at eight in the morning, my unfinished crossword still underneath it. The picture made the cover of Golf World, which arrived in my mailbox the same day that Jake’s postcard did. And so today, as I get ready to scramble some eggs for our breakfast tacos, light the smoker for the 10-hour pork shoulder that should be ready as the last putt drops, and get ready to hit the range with Jake so we can play a little golf before we sit down to watch the Masters together, I can take comfort in the fact that it won’t get any better than that that cover, and it won’t get any better than sitting in that grandstand earlier that Sunday morning. And it doesn’t have to.

I don’t know if it was a 5:30 off-the-air time butting up against the last putt dropping at about 5:20, or an appreciation for some basic aesthetics and a sense of the importance of tradition (and since we’re talking about Golf Channel, I’m going with the former), but they finally got it right. At the conclusion of this year’s Kraft-Nabisco Championship, winner Stacy Lewis walked to the scorer’s tent, signed her scorecard, and then walked back across the bridge to the green, whereupon she did exactly what she should have done. She, her caddie Travis Wilson, and her mother, father, and sister immediately made the traditional jump into the lake adjacent the 18th green.

And it’s good that they did. Because that jump had, of late, taken on all the spontaneity of your daily visit from the mailman. Yeah, it’ll happen. Eventually. This time, there was no waiting for long, drawn-out speeches. No protracted trophy presentations with the requisite thanks to the club, the sponsor, the volunteers, and the like. No syrupy-voiced commentator-turned-trophy presentation emcee spewing 15 minutes of platitudes and half-hearted praise for as many names as could be scribbled on an index card and then saying, “Well, Stacy, we know you’ve been waiting a long time for this moment (no shit, Sherlock, so have we–ever since you started talking…), but it’s time to take that leap!” They just took a deep breath, ran, and jumped. When Amy Alcott first did it after winning in 1988, that’s what she and her caddie did. But the more it became a “tradition,” the more it lost a little something.

Granted, I haven’t been shooting the tournament for an incredibly long time, but just as I find myself turning into those people from Austin I used to hate (“I remember when Antone’s was up by campus and that road had traffic lights on it!”), I’ve been doing it long enough, and I find myself reminiscing about the way it used to be. I’ve been doing it long enough, for example, to remember when the water hazard fronting the 18th hole was a real lake, with pond scum and mud that you sank in up to your ankles when you tried to set up a tripod in it and was home to all sorts of bacteria whose names you dared not think about, let alone try to pronounce. Now it’s a glorified kiddie pool, complete with a gunite bottom and sides.* I went back through my archives to my first Kraft-Nabisco Championship, back in 2004. Grace Park daintily jumped into that murky pond while her caddie, David Brooker, went positively airborne above her. Karrie Webb did what looked like, from the vantage point of my remote camera sunk on a tripod to water-level, some sort of a cannonball in 2006. Lorena Ochoa was mobbed by twentysomething of her nearest and dearest in 2008. So there is still the chance that something a little silly can happen. One thing is certain, though: the more things progress, the more staged the whole thing becomes. More television cameras creep into the background. More time passes between the victory and the jump itself. What was a simple, exuberant leap by two people from a putting green into a lake has since turned into a made-for-TV event that, in terms of things that happen at a pro golf event, suffers the same fate as all made-for-TV events that happen at a pro golf event that Golf Channel manages to sink its hooks into: no spontaneity, TV cameramen rushing in with wide lenses, antenna pointers and microphone guys screwing up the background and depriving just about anyone not watching on TV from being able to see what’s going on. It had grown into an antiseptic, almost obligatory thing. Not this time.

For whatever reason, whoever made the call for Stacy to go right on ahead and jump got it right. Of course, the cynic in me is still pretty sure that if there was half an hour of air time to kill we would have had to sit through the speeches and platitudes and Stacy would have had to hold back that desire to do what she had earned the right to do until someone in the TV production truck told her it was okay to do it. But yesterday things just worked out. So, I guess, thank you.

* An unfortunate side effect to the “progress” of paving of the hazard fronting the green reared its head yesterday, when Stacy Lewis’ mother broke her leg on the jump when she hit the solid bottom of the “pool.” I doubt that would have happened a few years ago, when the only thing at the bottom of that lake was a bunch of mud and god knows what else.

This one’s for everyone who wonders what really goes into making a golf picture “work.” The thinking often goes, they’re playing the same course for four days; by Sunday you ought to have things dialed in to perfection, right? Well, sometimes the reality is that there are a lot of factors that go into a picture working or not, and as a result you may only have one shot at something. So when you see it, you’d better make the most of it.

Here you have the same golfer, on the same tee, at the same time of day–that would be Stacy Lewis, on the eighth tee, at about 3 in the afternoon. The only differences are the day of the week and the weather: The top picture was shot on Saturday, with high overcast clouds; the lower picture was shot on Sunday, with clear blue skies. Each one was shot with the exact same lens on the exact same camera (a Canon 5D Mark II with a 70-200mm f4.) Exposures were correct for her face. An no, for you cynics out there, there’s no magic graduated filter (digital or otherwise) applied. Notice how everything in the first shot comes together — the background is identifiable (and scenic), and it provides a sense of place; the flowers give a nice foreground element and a touch of color (as does her turquoise shirt), and the clouds create a diffuse light that removes any harsh shadows and evens out the exposure between her face and the mountainside and what bits of blue sky there are. Not only that, but the location of the tee markers placed her on the left side of the frame, facing into what could easily be a two-page spread. I remember thinking to myself, “I’ve got to do this again tomorrow.”

Well, I did. Only this time there were no clouds, so opening up to expose for her face in the harsh desert sun blew out the sky and the mountains completely. It also washed out the flowers; her gray shirt didn’t help to make things any more colorful, and what’s more, the position of the tee markers placed her to the right of the frame (that is, if you wanted to retain a composition with the mountains and flowers in it), making for an awkward spread, at best.

The moral of our story? Yes, when you’re covering pro golf, the pictures from the last day are the ones that really matter, and you always want to shoot what you think are the best angles then. But don’t let that stop you from shooting them earlier in the week, as well–because you just never know if you’ll get the same opportunity, or see the same picture, again.

I’m not normally one to park myself on a tee box for an extended period of time but there are a few exceptions to this rule. The second hole of the Dinah Shore Course at Mission Hills Country Club in Rancho Mirage, home of the what-used-to-be-called-the-Dinah-Shore-and-is-now-called-the-Kraft-Nabisco-and-next-year-will-be-called-something-else Championship is one of those places.

For about 45 minutes in the morning, from about 7:50 until 8:35 or so, you’ll have a hard time finding a better tee box anywhere. The sun is still low enough to get under visors and provide catch lights in eyes, and off to the side just enough to add shadow and modeling to faces. Add to that a clump of trees slightly behind the tee box at camera right which keeps the gallery behind the golfers in the shade, and another grove of tall trees about 200 yards behind the tee box for a backdrop.  The 45-minute window provides just enough time for 4 or 5 groups to roll through before the sun gets too high and the gorgeous light goes away, and with the first tee time at 7:00 a.m., that means that the “meat of the order” of the morning pairings gets there just in time. This morning we had Morgan Pressel, Sandra Gal, Cristie Kerr, and Yani Tseng (above); tomorrow we’ll get Paula Creamer, Michelle Wie, and Suzanne Pettersen, among others, coming through just as the light gets good.

We’re usually not so fortunate. The past couple of years the pairings gods have been against us, with the marquee groups starting on the back nine on Thursday morning and the front on Thursday afternoon (thus guaranteeing they’ll start on the back on Friday morning). This year, it’s all coming together.

For the photographically curious: No, it’s not cropped. It’s not even photoshopped, save for pulling the contrast down by about 5 points, and converting the raw file to a jpeg, in Lightroom. Otherwise, this is straight out of the camera, shot on a Canon Mark IV with a 400mm 2.8 LII lens, lying on the ground with a Canon Angle Finder C attached. It’s that last part that helps clean up the background, using the tops of some blades of grass in the foreground to give it that graduated haze effect at the bottom of the frame.