Golf Course Image Crops

With the purchase of my new 27″ monitor, taking the opportunity to go through my backlog of golf course photos seemed like a good idea. At the recommendation of a friend, I decided to download the free Paint.NET photo editing suite available online. I became encouraged when going through some older photos from 2008 I took at Bethpage Red and Huntingdon Valley Country Club, especially when the photos were zoomed and cropped by the bounds of the monitor.

While certainly not new, the use of a crop to select the interesting portion of the photograph re-sparked my interest in golf course photography. I am going to try to consider the camera as a “light collector” instead of using the zoom to frame and focus the shot. I can crop the interesting portion later in the post-processing.

Here are a few of my better efforts with the 2008 photos.

This is one of the more popular views from the Bethpage Red fourth green or the Black’s eighteenth tee. I took the first one from the Red’s fourth green and the second from the Black’s eighteenth tee just below. I cropped the sky from both images and I like that doing so gave a sense of breadth to the property. I think this more accurately represents how the viewer takes in the panorama.

The day I played Bethpage Red stayed overcast for the most part, though while we putted on the fifth green we got a hint of sunlight looking back toward the fairway and tee. The photo gives a good sense of how the hole sweeps up the hillside and away from the area shared with the Black Course.

One of my favorite aspects of the Red Course at Bethpage State Park is the expansive tee shots offered in the middle stretch of the course. The horizontal cropping of these views of the ninth hole emphasize the angles of attack presented to the golfer. The tighter crop of the second photo does well to represent how the golfer’s eye traces the ground looking for the line to attack the hole. The fact that the green is visible on the left side over the bunkers and trees demonstrates how a hole can effectively dogleg without the use of framing trees or features.

I haven’t gotten into many of the Huntingdon Valley shots from 2008, but this is one of the early returns. The horizontal crop emphasized the uphill nature of the tough approach into the eighteenth green. I’ve always liked the view of the flag-stick peeking over the bunkers in the hillside. The green extends further right of the flag-stick than the bunkering suggests, so much so that this seemingly middle hole location is actually closer to the left edge.