Here are the opening paragraphs from an article I wrote about golf photography last year. I've posted this on my blog before, but I think it is worth airing again.

First impressions

Like curry, politics and religion, photography prompts an immediate response. Indeed, unlike other media, there is no pause, delay or interruption when you look at a photograph - you either love it, or you hate it. For some, however, the issue of photography goes far beyond merely preferences.

“I can’t believe they don’t get it,” exclaims an incensed magazine editor. “Good photography can make such a difference to their coverage.” Sitting quietly, I let the respected journalist let fly, venting his fury on golf clubs that clearly don’t agree with his assertion. With 22 years under his belt, the daily search for images for his market-leading magazine has clearly left its mark.

I have heard this so many times from editors. Faced with a dearth of good photography, they inevitably fall back on clubs that do provide good-quality images that capture the spirit of the game and instil a desire to play. That, after all, is what golf-friendly magazines, websites and newspapers are all about. The result is clubs with good photography get greater coverage. 

Proud to be home

I have just posted new images of Forrester Park as part of a photography project I am working on with the Fife Golf Partnership. The idea is to shoot a series of courses around Fife that perhaps don't get the recognition they deserve.

It has been a fascinating exercise.

Despite growing up in St Andrews and bringing up my two sons with my wife in Fife, I haven't really had an opportunity to study in any depth the courses outside my front door, so to speak. I remember playing them as a kid and I have often driven past them wondering what they would be like to shoot, but more often than not my work has taken me further a field, until now.

Fife is awash with interesting, quirky and quality layouts that many visiting golfers have never heard of, nevermind seen. Now that I have had my chance to photograph some of them, I hope I have captured something of what makes them special.

Anyway, here's the link to the Forrester Park images. Let me know what you think.

http://www.markalexanderphotography.co.uk/ForresterPark/

 

New images

Just posted some new images of Ladybank Golf Club. As ever, these are best viewed by selecting the full-screen option on the right-hand side of the website window.

I will be working on more images this week so you can expect further galleries to follow soon.

Let me know what you think.

 

http://www.markalexanderphotography.co.uk/Ladybank/

Higher power

Here's an excerpt from an ode I wrote about golf tees. It was first published in Golf Illustrated. Hope you enjoy it.

LOVE FOR AN ELEVATOR

From its earliest beginnings, the humble golf tee has been often overlooked and taken for granted. Well, no more

Golf is a game built on confidence. With it, your swing becomes effortless, your thoughts pure and the outcome of each shot preordained. Nirvana found. Without it, golf becomes a tortuous test of self-resilience that can be as much fun as a poke in the eye.

Confidence is key. It can mean the difference between a golfing high and calamitous low. It drives golf club and ball sales around the world and, wonderfully, at the start of every hole, the gods of golf offer us a precious taste of it in the form of the humble tee peg.

It may seem like a small thing, but a ball perched on top of a tee is both iconic and reassuring. Discussing the value of the common tee in a 1965 issue of Sports Illustrated, Jack Nicklaus asked: “When you can have a perfect lie, why give yourself a mediocre one? This is a question I ask… when I see golfers, both good ones and bad, hitting a tee shot on a par-3 hole without teeing up the ball.”

Although clearly not favoured by the world’s greatest player, failing to use a tee is certainly within the confines of the game. In fact according to the R&A’s eleventh Rule of Golf, a player is permitted to hit a tee shot from the ground (which includes irregularities in the surface), from sand or another natural substance. This ruling harks back to the days when golfers teed up the ball using a pile of sand or fashioned mounds of earth as impromptu perches. Indeed, some players still follow this approach; Laura Davies being one.

If you choose to follow the Golden Bear’s advice and tee it up, it would be advisable to choose a conforming tee that is no more than four inches in height, doesn’t indicate the line of play and doesn’t influence the movement of the ball or generally assist you in any way. These stipulations are important because if a player were to use such a tee he could find himself being unceremoniously disqualified and duly marched from the course. A conforming tee may be a godsend, but using one that is not could have severe consequences. You have been warned.

Teaching pros will tell you that using a tee properly will raise the ball above the top of the grass thereby cutting down your chances of hitting a fat shot. More crucially it can prevent blades of grass being trapped between the ball and the clubface enabling the club to attack the ball cleanly producing maximum backspin on the greens. All this results in more accuracy, greater consistency and, ultimately, lower scores. Who would have thought a couple of inches of plastic or wood could do so much?

With so much going for them, you might imagine the first tees were snapped up by golf fans eager to get their hands on the latest game-improvement technology. Apparently not. When the American dentist William Lowell patented the Reddy Tee in 1921 (so named because the tee was painted red), it had been 22 years since the first tee patent application had been lodged; coincidentally also by an American dentist called George F Grant. Unfortunately the intervening years had not enamoured golfers to the idea who refused to play with the pegs despite them being handed out for free. It was only when Walter Hagen received $1,500 from Lowell for endorsing his Reddy Tee that the idea sparked the public’s imagination and the idea caught on.

 

Links beauty

The summer in Scotland (the first for about six years) has been wonderful, producing ideal conditions for hard and bouncy fairways and slick and fast greens. At Muirfield and St Andrews, we saw Majors decided over historic courses that for once, bit back.

Now I know there is a deep love for all things links, but I wonder if our love of salt-laiden air and lively turf is purely derived from the playing experience, rather than aesthetic appreciation. As a photographer, I love shooting all kinds of courses – links, heathland, parkland, clifftop, resort; you name it, I’II shoot it. The objective is to select the features that make each course stand out. For me, a big part of what I do is discovering beauty in what I find in front of me.

A links course that has been exposed to the relentless sun and wind and then exhaustively managed to within an inch of its life, is a spectacle of humps and hollows that conjure up fear and excitement in equal measures. I have just finished processing a batch of images of a course that looks as wonderfully linksy as I have seen for a long time, but I wonder if the viewer sees it the same way.

We all know that seaside turf is special. The fun, difficulty and possibilities it provides makes links golf a joy. But, when you see a true links course, brown and bare, does this titillate like an image of Augusta would?

 

Let me know.

 

Resurrection men

A story of a fabled links designed by Old Tom Morris convinced a group of fanatics to rescue the forgotten layout hidden somewhere on Scotland’s Western Isles. Intrigued, Mark Alexander finds out how they did it

Golf can do funny things to people. Perhaps it’s the smell of the grass or the undulation in the greens. It could be the pressure on the first tee or simply a good walk followed by the pleasure of a pure strike that does it. Whatever it is, it is a powerful potion.

Of course some of us are more susceptible to golf’s charms. The golfer who diligently takes his weekly direction from the club pro or elopes to sun-drenched fairways while his bank balance, and wife, scream that he shouldn’t. From the unquestioning commitment of the youngest member of the club to the die-hard determination of the oldest, golf instills a love that few sports can match.

On South Uist, where 20 miles of brilliant-white shell beaches run continuously down the west coast of the island, that love has inspired a monument to golf. Lying roughly 60 miles west of the Scottish mainland, somewhere towards the outer extremities of the UK, a golf course has been built, by hand, on a pristine stretch of stunning linksland. Most importantly, it has been built by those who treasure the game and its origins.

“It was pure golf design,” admits golf course architect Martin Ebert, “and one of the best bits of land I had ever had the opportunity to work on.” Martin was one of an army of volunteers who have willingly given up their time over the last six years to secure Askernish Golf Club. “It was the pure love of golf. The project wasn’t really commercially orientated; it was more about making it as good as we could and hopefully re-finding some of those Old Tom masterpieces.”

You see, despite Honorary President Kenny Dalglish officially opening the club in the summer of 2008 and club captain Donald MacInnes hitting a sweet opening tee-shot with an aging hickory iron, the club has history, and plenty of it. In fact, records show the club stretches back 120 years to a time of tweed coats, white beards and snug-fitting bonnets. Indeed, the twists and turns of this enigmatic place were first conceived in 1891 by the grand master of golf himself; Old Tom Morris. This is a place of resurrection.

“There is no doubt,” Martin insists, “all the evidence is here that Old Tom was striding these links. It’s every architect’s dream to work with land of the highest quality, but to follow in Old Tom’s footsteps is something special.”

How Old Tom Morris came to be on a Hebridean island at the age of 70, just a few years before his death, is an intriguing tale. How a respected golf course architect together with a band of esteemed industry experts and fanatical enthusiasts returned 115 years later to unearth his lost course could easily become a poignant Hollywood script.

There can be only one

While East Lothian basks in the media spotlight, there is one course that perhaps deserves a little more of the limelight. Here's an excerpt from my Golf Illustrated article on Musselburgh...

 

Being the first golf course ever has a certain ring to it. It’s a title with added pizzazz and status. So significance is it, you would think it would be easy pick a winner. But it ain’t

 

Some birthdays pass by in a blink of an eye while others stay with you forever. Reg Dean celebrated his big day by going into the record books as the undisputed oldest man in Britain. He celebrated his birthday from his bed safe in the knowledge he had reached the top.

At 110, he had every right to take it easy while the national papers and news channels pounced at the opportunity to celebrate his landmark age. It is, after all, human nature to mark the achievements of others, especially when those achievements are unsurpassed. Reg celebrated his record in style. It’s a pity the same can’t be said for the World’s oldest golf course.

Until recently this title resided in the ancient, free-draining turf of the Old Course at Musselburgh, which is located just six miles east of Edinburgh. The unassuming links, which is encircled snugly by a horse-racing track, was home to some of the greats of the game. Legends like Wille Park Sr and Jr, Mungo Park, David Brown and Bob Ferguson all made a name for themselves here. It is believed the game-transforming Guttie ball was developed in the club-making shops that surrounded the course and, as significantly, six Open Championships were decided at Musselburgh which eventually got its full complement of nine holes in 1870.

During a golden era when the tentative green shoots of the modern game were first emerging, Musselburgh was, without question, at the centre of it all.

 

To find out more, visit http://www.golfillustrated.co.uk/