This week I had the opportunity to shoot the Hero World Challenge hosted by Tiger Woods and held at the Albany Golf Course here in the Bahamas. Below are a few things I learned from shooting golf for the first time.
Lesson No. 1
NEVER, NEVER, NEVER be a disturbance to the golfer, be invisible. This means you DO NOT release your shutter to capture an image until the golfer has hit the ball, unless you are far enough away, with a long enough lens, so that the golfer will not hear your shutter. NEVER capture an image during practice swings, with the caveat of distance being in play, as mentioned just now and NEVER capture an image during the back swing.
Lesson No. 2
This is very much related to No.1
While my cameras can run off 10 frames per second (fps) I found timing to capture the image I wanted was a much better approach to shooting than just holding the shutter button down to “spray and pray”. Here’s the thing, I truly believe that any sport that involves a ball MUST have the ball included in any action shots and to accomplish that in a sport like Golf is more about timing than fps. I discovered that for action shots there is impact with the ball, the follow through and the reaction, if any, from the golfer. You see holding the shutter down and using maximum fps creates two problems:
1) You will end up with hundreds, if not thousands of shots during a tournament that can be deemed unusable, that is, the ball is not in the shot.
2) Often times when firing off 10 fps you will still miss the point of impact or just after impact
So how did I accomplish my goal? I simply locked my focus, I use back button focus ALWAYS, I looked through the view finder and watch the movement of the golf club, once the golfer unwound to play the shot I would wait a split second and fire the trigger. No, this will not always be successful but I got some pretty good keepers. Unsurprisingly much of my “focus” was on Tiger Woods, big surprise there……and to be honest, I found timing his impact to be a real challenge. The two days I shot the event Tiger was paired with Justin Thomas and I could nail the impact or immediate post impact of Justin time and time again but with Tiger I continued to fail. it got frustrating for a while………then I learned the next lesson……
Lesson No. 3
When used correctly, using the maximum fps was actually a much better option than single shot…….so that throws No. 2 out the window…..well not really because there were times I did use the single shot in quiet mode with success.
Ok, so why did I first say I learned not to use maximum fps and now I say I found to be a better option?
I treated the maximum fps in the same manner as I did the single shot, I looked to time the impact of club face to ball and the extra fps almost guaranteed my success. While you should not capture an image until after the ball has been struck, timing remains key but the extra couple of frames allowed to capture the dirt moved from the divot and allowed me to include the ball in the frame. See examples below.
Lesson No. 4
This is one very simple, you do not always have to shoot at the widest aperture, there were often times I stopped down to f5.6. I was close enough that f5.6 would allow me to blur the back ground but still get more depth of focus on the golfer’s face.
What I really learned
Shooting golf successfully is all a matter of timing.
Other shots to capture to round out the portfolio from a Golf Tournament:
Capture the golfers follow through
Capture the golfers putting and include the hole in the image
Capture pitch shots and chips
Capture bunker play
Sometimes shoot a little wider to get a sense of space
I trust this has been of interest and as always I welcome questions and/or comments.
In case you were wondering about the gear I used for capturing this event:
Nikon D500 (DX body)
Nikon D3s (older full frame body)
Nikon 200-400mm f4 lens
Nikon 70-200mm f2.8 lens
