David Cannon on Capturing Seve and the Euro Tour's Glory Days

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Speaker 1: I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball.

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Speaker 2: In a bride egg Friday Egg, the dreaded Frida egg, Frida Egg, Frida Egg Egg, fridagg bride egg.

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Speaker 3: Lie, I'm about ready to run off the glum course. Welcome to the Frida Egg Golf Podcast. I'm Garrett Morrison, and today I'm talking with David Cannon about his illustrious career in golf photography. It's hard to sum up David's accomplishments in tournament golf photography. He's been at it for forty five years at this point. He's been on site for somewhere in the range of two hundred men's and women's majors, and he's captured many famous images, including the one you all know of Sevi Biasteris celebrating his nineteen eighty four Open victory with a fierce fist pump, and so we have a lot to talk about. David is a legend and I'm really looking forward to this conversation with him about his career, some of his experiences with Sev and other great players, his takes, on the craft of photography. All sorts of fun stuff on the agenda for today. But before we get to that interview, a quick word about Club TFE. This is Frida Egg Golf's membership. You can check it out at the Frida egg dot com slash membership. It's one hundred and twenty dollars a year and you get all kinds of perks with it, like exclusive content, a lively member comment section, a monthly virtual hangout with Frida Egg's staff, an annual gift, all that kind of stuff. We also recently announced our twenty twenty four Club TFE member guest event, and it's going to be held at a pretty cool golf course. That's all I'll say about that for now, But mainly I just wanted to speak for a moment about what this membership means for Frida Egg Golf. This is not something where we're buying a yacht with this money. We're not going to be building a massive headquarters with a moat around it. Maybe we'll get a latch for Andy's shed door, but that's really the only luxury we would consider. What Frida Egg members are actually doing is supporting our ability to make the kind of content that our audience wants from us. Club TFE subscriptions help us get out to tournaments, go see new courses, film those courses, write about them in an in depth way that would be hard to do with a purely ad supported model. This is the kind of content we want to do. We think it's the kind of content that you all want us to do, and it's made possible because of Club TFE members. So if you'd like to support Friday Golf in this way, go to the Friday dot com slash membership and join us in the club. Okay, David Cannon, thank you for being here. Yeah, it's a pleasure to start at the beginning. You were a serious competitive player when you were younger, and you happen to be a member of a really great generation of European golfers. So I'll mention a few names here and maybe you could just tell me about playing with them in your early years. So let's start with the first name, Sandy Lyle.

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Speaker 2: Okay, Sandy, Yeah, he was good friends, well still is a good friend. I first played with him, well, in the same competition as him. First time I saw him was in nineteen seventy three, when I played in a boys tournament in the Midlands and he lived fairly close to me, you know, we're talking fifty miles away. Yeah, he won that by a country mile. And I was very very green at that stage, and it was if I broke ninety both rounds. I think I did well. I can't remember it exactly the scores, but I know he won by a country mile. But so I actually spent quite a lot of time playing with him over the next probably three years, because he's quite local and I could tell you some stories about Sandy, you know when you we were in the same coaching Midland coaching group, and we used to go to a golf course called Woodhall Spa, which is now the headquarters of the English Golf Union, but in those days it was just a remote golf club in Lincolnshire, which is in middle of nowhere in England. But we used to go there for a weekend in the spring and the autumn of every year and to show you how good he was that you know, he used to have this party trick of standing on a golf ball on the range, half burying it and.

00:04:53
Speaker 1: Then hitting it with an old forward or a click or whatever.

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Speaker 2: We used to call them in those days, like a bullet out of this semi plug line. And that's where you knew you were up against it when you started playing with golfers who could do that.

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Speaker 3: Well, speaking of legendary ball strikers, the next name on my list is Nick Faldo.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: Well I've known Nick again since I've played with him in the British Youths in nineteen seventy five. And you know when you have a sort of almost pivotal moments in your life that you suddenly realized that perhaps you're not going to go the right way. That's where I hit my first obstacle wall whatever. And the last hole up panel in Yorkshire is downhill part fourth. Only in your dreams is it drivable. And I think he drove that green three days in a row, and it's super narrow outer bands on the left and I'm standing there thinking I'm going to hit a five iron off this whole because it's downhill.

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Speaker 1: It was in the summer and it was cold.

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Speaker 2: Run down there and hit a wedge on and this guy apparently well I didn't see all of them, I saw one of them. He drove the ball onto the front edge of the green, and that's what just a different class from the word go and the noise off the club was just epic. And he was using the big size ball at that stage because we still had the option to use this British ball one point six to two, which I always did because it went further and it was easier to use in the wind. But he from that stage, from the first go, he was on American size ball because he knew where he was going in life.

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Speaker 3: So he was he was playing the more difficult ball because he knew that that was the ball he was going to use.

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Speaker 2: When it was that self confident or self determined that he knew he had to use a ball he was going to use as professional going forward, because by that stage to the days of the one point six to two were numbered all right.

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Speaker 3: Now, the final name on my list is probably an obvious one. But you had some experiences with this player pretty early on, and that's savvy Biasterois.

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: So how lucky can you be or how does fate put you together? So nineteen seventy six, This was in May nineteen seventy six, and I was a member of a golf club, the Leicestershire Golf club that's my hometown, Leicester in England, and the European Tour in those days would play their tournaments would finish on Saturdays, you know, Sunday was still Sunday, and the tournaments would be held in a well. The tournament was held in Coventry, which was fifteen miles from Leicester, and then my club was hosting a pro am, so the pro am wouldn't be on a Wednesday before a tournaments as they are nowadays. It was on the day after. So the Sundays were usually the pro am days. And my club hosted this European Tour pro am and I was very luckily given one of the spots. The host club was allowed to give four people, one team of three I think three three members and then the pro and we drew Saviovayastaios as the pro in our group. And so a golf course that I had played probably oh God, in the summer, I would play enough I was at home. I played that twice a day from nineteen seventy three onwards. I was playing it all the time. I knew every blade of grass on that golf course, and he hit the ball into places we'd never seen more because he.

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Speaker 1: Was so long.

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Speaker 2: He hit it so amazingly, and he was so long, and his putting wasn't actually as we all remember it, you know, epic basically. So he struggled on the greens and I probably just about matched him for a score at the end of the day, but purely because I knew how to putt run those that course.

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Speaker 3: And it was just later that year, yeah.

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Speaker 2: I mean two months later he's runner up in the open to Johnny Miller at Birkdale. So but I mean you could see the flare. He played some amazing flop shots and stuff like that. He wasn't scared where the ball was going to go in any way, if I look back at it, you know, it was only eight years later I got my famous picture of which you can see behind me, you know, on the eighteenth Green at Saint Andrews. Who could ever have dreamt I hadn't even picked up a camera in my life at that stage. There you go, That's how life goes.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, well, let's get to that transition that you made. At some point you got introduced to sports photography, So tell me about how that happened.

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Speaker 2: Oh well, I'd always love photography, so I was very lucky to go to a private school in England. My parents scrimpt and saved to send me to what could be a pretty famous school now because it looks like Prince William's boys probably going to go there. Saint Edwards in Oxford known as Teddy's. And my study at boarding school was plastered with sports pictures. I used to cut them out of the newspapers and odd golf magazines, and most of the other boys in this all boys public school in those days would have either semi naked if you won't allow naked girls in those days, because it was still pretty prim and proper, or pop stars the walls. So I was a bit of an outcast, you know. So who's this weirdo with Tony Jacqueline and Tom Weiscoff and Jack Nicholas and Lee Trevino plastered all over his study wall? And I suppose that's my love of sports photography he started from there. I always loved looking at sports pictures and I was very very lucky to a meet a couple of incredible people in Leicester that my dad was in advertising and he used.

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Speaker 1: A photographer, a studio photographer.

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Speaker 2: Stroke he actually ran the Lester News service side of photography, so in other words, if there was a story in the Leicester area, he'd be phoned up by the national newspapers to go and cover it. And he also was a photographer for Leicester City Football Club and Leicester Tigers. And so I was introduced to Neville Chadwick at a publicity club dinner that I went with my father to or my and my mother, and we got on incredibly well straight off. And he also happened to have a very lovely daughter at that stage, who I then promptly started to date. And it's supposing how these things start.

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Speaker 1: But yeah, I borrowed a camera off my sister.

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Speaker 2: She had a nice old Russian Zenith or something, and I started clicking away, and obviously golf was my first target. And there was another girl who I used to play in mixed events in Leicester and around England, very good player, scratch player, and she wanted some pictures to give to the local magazine and I said, I'll come and try and take some pictures of her, and sure enough started taking pictures and they were used and I thought this is quite fun. I showed them to Neville and he said, well, you should probably do a bit more of this, and he said, how would you like to come down to the to the rugby. I think it was on a Thursday or a Wednesday afternoon, and at that stage I was also in an job, my job in those days, but I was selling nylon sheets, believe it or not, nylon bed sheets.

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Speaker 1: And then again.

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Speaker 2: It comes through my father introducing me to somebody else in the textile business, and I got this lovely easy job selling these sheet bed linen, which gave me time to play golf and a free car, and it was a perfect job really, but I was pretty bored, if I'm being honest, and i'd managed. I still had my original car that I'd used before I got this job, and I just on a whim that one afternoon before I went to this rugby match, I went down, flogged the car, got three or four hundred pounds for it, I think, then went straight to place a camera store in Leicester, which I was lucky because of about the cheapest camera store in the whole of Britain was based in Leicester, and funny enough, the guy who owned that camera store was a member of my golf club, so all things fitted into place and I managed to buy a really nice cannon camera and a small telephoto lens. And so I was down at this rugby match, feeling very proud of myself, and never said, right, you look after my cameras while I run up and down and in rugby photography, if you can, you run up and down the side of the pictures. And he said, just sit in the corner and I'll give you two tips, and here's a couple of roles of film. And I said, well, okay, fine, said fill the frame number one, because when you were using film that was really important. It's not like digital nowadays, where you've got the ability to crop in onto a file. In those days, what you got on the negative was what you played with. So the more you could put on a negative, the better. And he said, focus on the eyes of the subject, which is still the most important thing in photography to me, because the first thing you look at it when you look at a page, is that the eye of the subject. You wouldn't notice it necessarily, but your eyes are drawn straight away to the eyes of whoever's on the pitch on the picture. So I sat in the corner and clicked away. I think I took about a roll and a half film, which is, you know, probably about fifty pictures, I suppose. And I met up with Neville at the end of the game and we drove back to his office. This is all how it worked in those days, and he said, where are your roles of film?

00:14:12
Speaker 1: And I said, what do you mean.

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Speaker 2: He said, well, I'm going to put them on with mine, because the tanks used to take five roles of film at one and he had three and I had one and a half. And so he processed my two roles of one and a half rolls of film. And he came out of the dark room and he was holding up the strip of negatives and that's a nice picture. And I said straight away, I said to him, that's when the scrum half was nearly flattened by an enormous New Zealand rugby player.

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Speaker 1: And he said yeah.

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Speaker 2: I said, well, I remember taking that and I thought that might be a nice picture, and sure enough it was lovely. And then the next day he said, I'm going to send this to the newspapers and I thought, oh, that's that's amazing.

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Speaker 1: You know.

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Speaker 2: And in those days it was so union controlled. He wasn't allowed to use my name because I wasn't a member of the National Unit journalist, so it all went under his name. Anyway, You've phoned me up the next morning and he said, go and buy the Express newspaper. Sure enough, there in the Express was that picture. And if you can say that your life changed overnight. That was the moment that set me off from then. In every bit of spare time I had, I was taking pictures.

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Speaker 1: You know.

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Speaker 2: I wouldn't play golf on a Saturday or a Sunday. I'd go to football games if they were on or rugby, or i'd go to there's a motor racing circuit near me, near Leicester, Mallory Park. I'd go and photograph bikes there or Silverstone for the Formula One, you know, just because I could get credentials. I got it through his Leicester News service, so it was great. So I just learned for free basically, and I got film from him for nothing. But he never paid me a cent in a year and a half or two years that I was doing work for him. But my god, I learned quickly and it was so much fun.

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Speaker 3: As you got more into photographing golf tournaments, what was your learning curve, like, what did you do in correctly at the beginning and what did you learn to do right at golf tournaments as you got more experienced.

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Speaker 2: All I can say is those first two tipsy, they stuck in my brain and they're still there today to this day. And so that was a big concentration factor for me. I was always looking to try and get as close as I could to the subject because we didn't have the zoom lenses that we have in these nowadays are high quality, so you had to fix focal links, so you had to be as close as you possibly could to.

00:16:31
Speaker 1: Fill the frame. So that was number one.

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Speaker 2: Number two was attention to background, and I made loads of mistakes with that in the first place. And you know, on a golf course you always have these bloody spectator ropes excuse my language there, but spectator ropes and they cut through the pictures. So that's one thing I learned to avoid very quickly in photography. And then also the use of the light because we're shooting on film in those days. It's again film, you have to be spot on with your exposures. Whereas you know you can there is there is room for maneuver on the digital cameras, you can light and think quite dramatically, or you you still if you overexpose it, you're still in pro in trouble with digital. But if you're under exposed, so you get a little bit, it's amazing what you can get away with, whereas on film you had to be spot on, and so I learned that very quickly. But I say that, you know, the backgrounds became a really important part, and then also the use of the sun because you know, for most people you'd think you'd want to have the sun behind your head at the subject. Yes, you do for the first hour and a half of a day on a golf course and the last hour and a half, but in the middle of the day it's horrific because they're all wearing visors now and you don't see anything under those that you can just see on my eyes already, you know, And in film that's a brute to deal with. So there was a lot of that learning curve as well, So backlighting the middle of the day, full the first hour, last down.

00:18:03
Speaker 3: I'd like to ask you about a few special experiences that you had with Sevi Biasteros, about whom you put together a book a lovely book of photographs a couple of years ago simply called sev. First of all, there's that famous photo that you've already mentioned of him celebrating his winning putt on the eighteenth green at St. Andrews at the nineteen eighty four Open. You know, building off of what you've just said about your acquiring of techniques of photographing golf tournaments as you started to get more experienced, could you just give me the story behind getting this photo.

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Speaker 2: So obviously, Sevy is my hero, and that was my third Open Championship. Eighty two was my first one at Troon as a professional photographer. I actually went to seventy nine, but only for the practice days because I couldn't get a professional credential to that stage. I was still pretty green, if I'm being honest. It was a boiling hot week. I remember it was really hot, dry Open Championship with s and Andrews, and you know, Watson was on a cusp of winning yet another Open Championship in the final round. And so with golf, there's always that where do I go. Do I follow Sevy or do I wait for Watson on seventeen Because seventeen is always an amazing hole for pictures. And if you go to Saint Andrews, I literally have a role. I say to people, and only jokingly because it doesn't always happen, but I say, you can photograph eight tournaments and Andrews staying behind the first green, going to the second tee, walking across to the approach to the seventeenth green, standing behind the seventeenth green, and behind the eighteenth t and on the eighteenth green. You don't need to go any further because everything seems to happen and it's the best place for pictures.

00:19:55
Speaker 1: But anyway, Sevie played seventeen.

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Speaker 2: Obviously got a part, and at that point he was I think he was one behind at that stage. When he went onto the eighteen, it's t and I thought, right, you know, he's been my hero since that first day I played with him seventy six, and I thought, right, I'm going down eighteen. So I walked down eighteen. I watched his second shot from behind the green, saw where the ball finished, and then I lined myself up because if you look at the background there on the picture, it's neutral. And I was using a four hundred two point eight lens, which makes the background go out of focus, so you isolate the subject. And there were no ropes in the background, and luckily no TV cameramen or anything to take away.

00:20:38
Speaker 1: From what he was doing.

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Speaker 2: And I was actually lucky because AI had a feeling that, you know, this could be a really mega moment, so I'd put a fresh roll of film in. And that was actually quite critical because a film in those days, my camera would run at four four and a half five frames I think was meant to do five frames a second, but you just had to have batteries that are fully souped up and boiling hot together to do that. So I'm sitting there and I'm thinking, you know, I've only got seven seconds worth of film here, And if you look at that moment from the moment he hit the put to the moment where he hugs his caddy is actually well over seven seconds and basically the whole put I got him hit the put, and then when he started celebrating, I just put the finger down in a manual focus, just praying that I kept it all in focus. He didn't start running around or doing something that makes it even more difficult. And He's sort of hold the putt and then just as he goes up to his caddy to embrace his caddy, run out film. Literally, I used a whole role of film on that. And you know nowadays, if you're on digital camera, you can have ten thousand frames usually on those cards and you'll still be going. So that was and then I've got then I think to myself, right, I've got to mark that film because I'm going to make sure that one is marked, and I want to make sure that all the other films that I processed from that day were exposed properly. So I basically and then I meant to drive down to London the next morning with the film. This is again a massive contrast to how it worked nowadays. So but I was so excited about the potential of that film, and I had a cousin of my wife who was carrying my cat were helping me out that week with me, so we shared the drive back down to London, which is about eight hours in those days from Saint Andrew's overnight, and I was sat outside the office for when the dark room chat came in in the morning and I gave him my first lot of film and then I waited for that to come out, which takes about an hour and ten minutes. Once the machine's up and running, I saw that the exposures were good on that, so I just backed myself that i'd exposed it right, put that key role of film in.

00:22:53
Speaker 1: So I probably saw those pictures about half.

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Speaker 2: Ten eleven o'clock in the morning, and of course then you get the eyeglass out and you start going through them. And as it's going through the sequence, and if you see the sequence is fist pump was towards the clubhouse, which was actually at about forty five degrees where I was standing, because I chose my background for the background, that angle for the background, and then he suddenly turned towards me and just starts pumping the air like this, And that was right at the end of the film, and I still maintained to this day he must have been like a magnet drawn to me, because that's the best picture of the whole thing. And yeah, it's still probably one of the very best golf pictures I ever taken. And luckily, first when I saw it, I was just like, right, that's it. And I remember driving down to Slazenger. You know, he's wearing the Slazenger clothing and their head office was not very far from us where our office was in South London. I remember driving over that night with a set of copies of these of that slide and getting a phone call the next morning saying that wanted to use it for an advertisement. So yeah, from that moment onwards, that's definitely become one of my best ever pictures.

00:24:08
Speaker 3: Next up, could you take me to the final hole at the European Masters in nineteen ninety three.

00:24:16
Speaker 1: Sev Yeah, again, he was electric that afternoon. You know, this was Sevy four.

00:24:21
Speaker 2: You I think he'd birded every hole from the twelfth on that back nine, and he was miles behind. You know, he was five holes ahead of the leader at that stage, and obviously by the time he got to the eighteenth t that he was within one shot I think of the leader.

00:24:39
Speaker 1: And then I could tell from when he hit that t shirt.

00:24:42
Speaker 2: I know that that move of Seve, so that's going way right, And sure enough it was in the trees literally, I don't know exactly how far, six to eight feet from a concrete wall six foot high concrete wall that housed the swimming pool, and I remember him cogitating with his caddy Billy Foster. You know Billy, he's got a fantastic sense of humor and one of the great characters of golf basically, and Billy came out there and he was hit it out sideways, hit it out sideways. If you notice also on that foot, there's no actual television of that shot, and that's because the director had said to the cameraman there's no chance of him hitting this shot. I would just stand out in the fairway and wait for him to chip out.

00:25:30
Speaker 1: Anyway.

00:25:31
Speaker 2: I just couldn't believe my eyes. And then Billy trundles past me with a golf bag. No bleat, bleak, bleap chance, he said, you know. And Sevy's in there snorting ray on his knees, just looking up into the trees there.

00:25:45
Speaker 1: And then he just there's a whoosh.

00:25:47
Speaker 2: And if you look at the angle, if that hit the concrete wall where I was lying on the ground taking this pitch, it probably would have come straight at me on the ninety degree angle if it had hit the concrete. But anyway, no, and you know, another thing I've learned in my golf photography is roughly about six seconds if a player hits a full shot, a pro, whether it's with a driver or an iron, it's about six seconds from the moment he hits it to the moment it lands, so there's absolutely there's this silence and no noise from the ball going up through the trees, so I think always got it out. That's pretty good. And then there's a deafening raw six seconds later. Sure enough it landed on the front of the green and then he promptly managed to chip it in from there for an incredible birdie. But very sadly, I think Barry Lane managed to pinch the spoils, which was to this day it was a bit like Stuart Sink pinching that open at Turnbree of Watson. Those two moments would be two of my biggest disappointments in golf, But there we go.

00:26:49
Speaker 3: Sevy was obviously a hugely charismatic subject. Yeah, what do you think makes a golfer compelling to photographs? What's there?

00:27:00
Speaker 2: Well, you know what, I look back to the eighties and one big thing that does stand out is that a lot of pros in those days didn't wear hats. I don't know whether you've noticed it or whatever, But and then if you're talking about looking at the eyes of the subject.

00:27:16
Speaker 1: They're not wearing a hat.

00:27:17
Speaker 2: It's amazingly easier to get a proper, a proper look at somebody. And you know, Seve hated wearing hats. The only time he ever wore a hat was at the Masters, and that's because he got paid, what was in those days, with a fat check to wear his horrible Nike hat or whatever he was wearing in those weeks. And he didn't look it didn't look anything like in his hat in a hat, did he? And then when he plays in the Ryder Cup, he doesn't wear a hat because you don't have to wear hats in the Ryder Cup. And Nicholas, Nicholas when he won eighty six Masters, you know that great golden hair he's holding that put on the seventeenth no hat. So in the eighties I had a great advantage. You could really get someone. Whereas when Tiger comes along or Faldo through the nineties, he did wear a hat, not often, but he did, but he distilled when he won the Opens, he wasn't wearing a hat. So you get into the nineties and Tiger comes along and you'd never see a picture or a moment of him without his Nike hat, and that brings its own difficulties. Momently someone's under a hat. But Tiger's eyes, Tiger's eyes were incredible. Sevie's eyes are incredible. And you know I say that probably if you look through I had three periods in my life. I went from Seve, who was amazing, then Norman was pretty amazing to photograph, and then Tiger comes along, and I was really hoping that Rory would rip the last decade apart and become a huge He's pretty much a huge superstar, but he hasn't kicked on from twenty fourteen like we'd all thought he would. So Rory is the next one along, but he's still hasn't delivered fully. He has delivered amazingly, but I'm still praying for a Rory major or two.

00:29:08
Speaker 1: Well.

00:29:08
Speaker 3: Aside from Sevy and maybe even aside from some of the obvious players that you've mentioned, which golfers have been your favorites to shoot over the past forty some years.

00:29:23
Speaker 2: Ernie El's is right up there. Nick Price, Ernie Els both amazing. Nick Price probably the nicest person you'd ever meet in golf, and Ernie who has he has his moments but as far as a swing and friend, you know, he's been an amazing friend, and so those two are pretty high up. And then I go into the Montgomery Monty bless his heart, absolutely evil with photographers on a golf course, but when we get him off the golf course, it's probably one of the most charming people you'd ever meet in your life, and really good company. But yeah, so, yeah, obviously I'm a bit biased to the Europeans because you know, I do come to America, but only really for majors, and you know, I go to the I'm going to the Arnold Palmer next week and well week after next and the players, but other than those, I'm not really at too many PGA Tour events, so I don't get to know them quite like I have got to know the European players. And another thing is I always love doing the Walker Cups because that's where you get to meet a lot of the great players, certainly in American and British players have come through the Walker Cup, so you get an early look at them there.

00:30:38
Speaker 3: Well, you obviously still do a lot of work on the European Tour or what's now known as the DP World Tour.

00:30:44
Speaker 1: Yeah, you were.

00:30:45
Speaker 3: Also there when the European Tour was in what many would consider it's heyday, right, yeah, yeah, And so I wonder, you know, what, what's your what's your perspective on how things have changed over the years on the European Tour. What how are the events different now than they were back in the eighties.

00:31:04
Speaker 2: Well, I've got to say, I think I was very privileged and very very lucky to be part of that generation because basically, the European Tour as it was then had eighty percent of the best players in the world playing on that tour week in, week out, and because of that, we got great sponsorship into Asia, you know, in those early days of playing in Asia, and we would have these fantastic turn of the Johnny Walker tournaments especially spring to mind, all across Asia each year, you know, and they they would invite the Freddie couples of this world, or one or two other Americans who were who would travel. You know, you know, it was a shame that the Americans didn't travel as much as the European players, because there's no question the European and South African players they know how to travel, and they do travel across the world, whereas it's one of the things that were you know, were come up against going forward. I think it's going to be getting the Americans out of America. You know, it's all very well for Live players because they will go because they're contracted to, but to get them, you know, to get Rory's dream. And I would sit down with you now and say that's my dream for golf because it hurts so much now to not be to be going to the Players Championship and thinking, hey, we're missing about six or seven players here at least who might have who should have been here and would have contended in this event and made it an amazing event it needs to be. And you know, Live has taken that away from us, and I think unfortunately we're going to have to live with it. It has another pun, but we are going to have to live with Live, and you know, there's got to be a way in going forward that golf gets its head together and accommodates this and or creates something that we can work in work for everybody, because it's a damn shame what's happening now.

00:32:59
Speaker 3: I agree, and I think that one of the events where things tend to still come together and feel, you know, fully formed and authentic is the Ryder Cup. And you've been to many Ryder Cups over the years. I wonder which one you remember the most fondly or which one you had the best time shooting.

00:33:24
Speaker 2: Difficult, I mean there were so many. We've been so lucky in Europe because we've had such good run. Nineteen eighty five Torrance's final putt at the Belfry, that was a pretty amazing. You know, as a youngster, I'd took gone as a spectator to the seventy three Ryder Cup at Millfield where we got absolutely annihilated. And I'd been to the seventy seven Ryder Cup at Royalism where you know Faldo, lyle Ken, Brown, Mark James all part of the team. But we've got absolutely cremated on that one as well. And then eighty three so close in Palm Beach. But then eighty five obviously Tony Jacklin's Mary crew led by Sevi basically and it transformed it the Ryder Cup. You know, that moment when Sam's got his arms up in the air on the eighteenth green at the Belfry is pretty high on my favorite pictures list. And then after that, winning in eighty seven following one which we never dreamt of winning a Ryder Cup in America but was probably our strongest. You have to argue the teams, but I reckon that team was pretty strong that year. And you know, young Elazabelle and then all the sev at his height, Valdo going into his height, Sandy Lyle won the Masters that year. Langar had already won the Masters as well, so that team was pretty strong. And then we took Nicholas down, you know, down at his home club, and that was an amazing week and the party after that at the moment in there's some pictures in I've Got a Jacqueline. You know, the British crowds are unique in golf. You know, they are buried biased again, but I think they are unique. They know how to party and they party properly. After that, and you know, suddenly Tony Jacqueline and Sam Torrens arrive in this nick folder, arrive in the in the sort of beer tent I suppose you'd call it, and they're standing on the table and they're singing and it's amazing, absolutely amazing. And then I was lucky enough to become the official photographer for the team from nineteen ninety five toil the one in Hazel team. Not a great way to end for me, but I did ten Ryder Cups as the official photographer and that was the hardest weeks you could ever imagine, working wise, And that's kind of why I passed it on to other people that get the images, because it took such a toll those functions. They had to go where we all had to go to the functions. It was a full on week. I was praying for Friday morning by the time I got to Friday so we could do photographs, some golf. But yeah, there were some great memories. I mean, even the ones we lost in a Brookline and Kihwa, they were epic, epic Ryder Cups and if you just take it as a as a neutral, they were astonishing. Hopefully we can have a good one best page because that could be something else.

00:36:32
Speaker 3: With the crowds there, I'm expecting it to be to be really fun marks right, Yeah, fun in all the all the meanings of that word. Yeah. So you know, if you consider the four men's Majors and maybe the five Men's Majors, if you include the Ryder Cup in that list of those, Logistically speaking, which one is the hardest to photograph?

00:37:00
Speaker 2: A Ryder Cup's pretty hard because you're having to walk with them all the time, so you know, physically that's a really really hard grind for the Friday, especially Friday and Saturday, and then Sunday it happens so fast. There's no way to describe as a photographer how fast that thing happens.

00:37:18
Speaker 1: On Saturday.

00:37:19
Speaker 2: You know, it's five hours from start to finish basically of golf, and it's all over in a blink. So that brings its own different kinds of battles to as a photographer. And then you know it's being in the right place at the right time. In Italy last one, I seem to be in the wrong place for everything that happened on that final day. It was the most frustrating day I've had in a Rider Cup in my life, whereas in Paris I managed to be in the right place for everything. So you know, it's an absolute and I knew I know what I'm doing, and I knew it was going down, and I just couldn't get from the eighteenth green to the sixteenth green because I knew it was going to come down to Fleetwoods match.

00:38:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, that was what was going on there.

00:38:05
Speaker 3: So besides golf, what is your favorite sport to shoot?

00:38:10
Speaker 2: I love football, soccer as you'd call it over there, but I love football, and I did a lot of football, you know. I've been to eight World Cup finals, and in the eighties and certainly until the early nineties, I was doing as much.

00:38:26
Speaker 1: Football as I was golf.

00:38:28
Speaker 2: And that's why I actually missed quite a few US Opens for World Cups and European Championship football tournaments, which are in June and always clashed with the US Open and the PGA. I miss a few because it started up the start of the Premier League season or First Division season as it was in those days. So I'm born and bred on football, really, you know. That's how I always say to as a sports photographer, if you can photograph football, soccer, you'll photograph any sport because it's so un predictable. It's not like American football, where you know on the third down they're pretty much going to throw to a wide receiver most of the time. With soccer, the only predictable thing is a corner kick, but you don't know where it's going your corner kicks and you know, other than that, it's an absolute lottery. So that's a really hard sports photograph. And if you learn that one, you'll do any sport. So I love that and I love all sports. You know, I've been I've been to the lots of Olympics as well, and you know, God, that's an amazing thing to do summer Olympics. Yeah, as a sports photographer, what an event that is?

00:39:36
Speaker 3: Yeah, that that that is sort of that is sort of the apex. So interesting what you're saying about shooting football, where the unpredictability of it is kind of the difficulty because I would have thought initially, well, if you're shooting a football game, then you're then you're in one place, right, You're It's not like a golf element where you have to traps all over all over the property. So that you know, shooting golf is very physical, like it's it is tiring, especially if you're not in shape. If you're shooting a football game, then you're kind of in one spot. But it has its own difficulty because you don't know when stuff is going to happen.

00:40:11
Speaker 2: No, it has to arrive and the right focal length you know, you have to have the right lens on. You know, amount of times I lost amazing pictures of football because I've chopped someone's foot off because they come too close or it's too far away down the pitch. You know, at least with golf you have got a chance of getting to where you can fill the frame, you can be in the right place. But physically golf is a mission. I've worked out this is only a rough stat that I've walked from London to Auckland in New Zealand and I'm halfway across Australia on the way back to London, just covering golf tournaments in my sports photography career. You know, if you work out on your average paces, you know average paces, I'll do fifteen thousand a day during an average during a normal TAURT tournament day, and then you've had another fifteen thousand for the practice days. Yeah, it's already sixty thousand steps a week in any sort of tournament, and that gets you a long way very quickly. If you're doing twenty five to thirty five tournaments a year, which I have been doing over the years, and that adds up very quickly.

00:41:21
Speaker 1: So it's quite physical.

00:41:23
Speaker 3: Now that we're deep into the podcast here, David, I'd love to get into a little bit of shop talk again it comes to photography.

00:41:32
Speaker 1: I do well.

00:41:33
Speaker 3: I do a little bit of photography, you know, of course, I'm nowhere near professional with it, but I am curious about some of the some of the specifics of your process. So yeah, you know, first of all, what is your standard gear for shooting a golf tournament?

00:41:50
Speaker 2: Okay, so a normal tournament, not a major. I'll have two camera bodies that I'll take out with me, which would be Canon R three's I've got currently, which is the new mirrorless one, which has transformed the way we shoot golf silent shutters, so we're now you can shoot all sorts of pictures you never dreamt of getting with a film camera.

00:42:12
Speaker 1: So that's been brilliant.

00:42:13
Speaker 2: And I have probably take out three lenses with me on an average day, might be four, depending on what course and what the weather's like. So I have a six hundred mili F four cannon lens, which is my standard lens as I call it, which is, you know, a fifteen thousand dollars massive thing, but absolutely essential for gold photography. And then I have a seventy to three hundred zoom which fills up another sort of mid size gap. And then I either have a twenty four to one oh five zoom lens wide angle or of fourteen to thirty five wide angle, So that pretty much does me. I have a flash, don't normally carry it out set for the Sunday on a tournament. So there for the presentation and that's about it. But I do have another body in R five, which is much it's super high quality that I use for landscapes, and that may well come out if the course or the event is you know, when you're on an Open championship, when you've got lovely views.

00:43:17
Speaker 1: And stuff, then I'll use that there.

00:43:20
Speaker 2: So you know, that's probably nearly forty pounds a gear, and I'm carrying fifteen thousand steps around a golf course in my late sixties, so I'm still doing all right.

00:43:31
Speaker 3: This is how you stay in such good shape. So you've referred a couple of times to switching from film to digital. Yeah, I wonder if you could just sum up for you what has been the impact of that transition.

00:43:48
Speaker 2: Okay, so I was very much a color slide film shooter in the eighties and nineties because that was you know, color photography was the key Sports Illustrated, all those up high end magazines Golf Digest when they're around and or all high quality color. So everything I shot was on a high, high quality slide film and on an average tournament. This is quite a good sort of comparison. On a day, if I shot ten rolls of film, that was a big day for me. So that's three hundred and sixty pictures, and you know that was a lot in those days. So if you multiply that by four days, five days of the tournament, I might go back home with sixty to eighty rolls of film for processing from a tournament. Now, if I shoot under three thousand pictures in a morning, I think that's you know, that's a pretty abstemious morning shooting for me. Because these cameras go at thirty frames a second in silent mode. So god knows what we'd have done just the sheer expense of that in the old days of buying the film and processing it would have you think, Now we can shoot three thousand pictures and the only thing you're paying for is electricity. Feel laptop basically and your time. So it's a big radical change, and it is more flexible, there's no doubt, but you still have to expose it properly. And you know, you've got these faster shutter speeds now which are also in the game, so I can now shoot it. Sometimes I got to ten, twelve, twelve, thousands of a second, whereas in the other the old days on film, I fire shot at thousands of a second. I'd have been pleased with myself when I think of the thrill of looking at films on a light box, going through that thirty six strip of film or the slother mounted slides and just looking through them. And now you just go flying through on your laptops and you know, as I say, three thousand pictures, I can edit that in probably five minutes just going through, and I have it down to twenty pictures in five minutes, and then you can edit them and you can transmit in the world and see them within forty five minutes of coming in with three thousand frames. You know, if I had to edit eighty rolls of film, that takes me a day to edit that much.

00:46:09
Speaker 1: So it's so different.

00:46:11
Speaker 3: You know, when I think about the impact of a change like this. I could kind of go two ways about it, where on the one hand, having more choice of photos would presumably allow you to find the gems and maybe have more of an element of luck or happenstance finding a great photo that you may not have gotten if you were shooting with film. On the other hand, maybe it's changed the discipline a little bit. I remember shooting on film, and I remember the sensation of, well, I better I better do something good here, right because I'm going to print this up and it costs a little bit of money, and you know I can't I can't really change it, and so I'd better do it right in camera the first time. Whereas now that I, you know, use a digital camera, I kind of think, well, I can sort of fix some things afterwards, or I can take a bunch of photos and just see which one is good. And I wonder if that discipline has made me less of a good photographer. You know, what's what's your take on that?

00:47:18
Speaker 1: It goes both ways?

00:47:19
Speaker 2: One side of me that says, yes, God, you know we were different in those days because a we were pretty good with manual focus in the eighties. Certainly you had to use manual focus. Now it's all away auto focus, which is incredibly accurate. So you had that sort of skill that you had to have, and also being aware of how much it was costing you to shoot a role of film by the time you bought the film, which was I don't know, I'll say five dollars a roll minimum for the color slide film in those days. Then you had to process was another five dollars, so ten to fifteen dollars a role to process and mount it. You multiply that by ten each day. It was pretty getting pretty expensive by the time you got off the airplane going to photograph a major golf tournament.

00:48:13
Speaker 1: Whereas now, you know, you.

00:48:14
Speaker 2: Just got as I say, you take you, but you buy your laptop and you can shoot thousands of frames, and the skill of getting that peak moment with film has gone because now the digital cameras, they are so fast and so good with the with the auto focus, you do get hell of a lot more pictures to choose from. You know, if I could have got the standard of picture I'm getting now and be trying to sell that in the seventies and eighties and nineties, my god, I've had a front cover of Sports Illustrated every week or Golf Digest every month because they're so good. So it's a it's a big change, and we changed, well, I changed personally in two thousand than too for the World Cup football in Japan, with the whole company went all digital because that first Canon digital camera came out, the Professional one EOS one D, and once that hit the scene, there was no brainer for I still shot film for my course photography right up till twenty twelve. After that, digital cameras got so good that again there was no argument to me. It just didn't make economic sense.

00:49:31
Speaker 1: Sadly.

00:49:32
Speaker 3: Another big technological change in photography is the advent of drones. This has had maybe more of an impact on golf course photography, which you do a great deal of yourself, you know. We my company does a lot of golf course photography, and of course a lot of it is drone. It just is it's a little more efficient, you know. And I don't want you to worry about offending me with with any kind of take you might have on drones. But I'm curious to get your opinion on drones and their impact on golf course photography specifically.

00:50:10
Speaker 2: Again, it's one of these funny things. It's like, there's two ways to look at it. One is given you a completely new medium for shooting a golf course. Yes, you could use helicopters, but my god, they were expensive, or they are still expensive.

00:50:27
Speaker 1: B there's the noise factor.

00:50:29
Speaker 2: There's everything about using a helicopter that's hard work, and you've got to have an amazing pilot to get you low enough and all.

00:50:35
Speaker 1: This sort of thing.

00:50:36
Speaker 2: With a drone, you've got that amazing freedom to shoot pictures that you would never get with a helicopter. And you know, again, they're fairly reasonable priced. I've got these Magic pros and they're astonishing quality from a tiny little camera, but I think they can be overused.

00:50:57
Speaker 1: You know.

00:50:57
Speaker 2: Now basically almost everything you see online is drone photography, and that's a worrying thing for me because I still i'm a bit of a Yes, the balance is finding the balance between a great still from ground level and an awesome aerial. But people use the drones too much, is my take on it. So I kind of try to balance it and get quite finicky. When I use a drone, it has to be absolutely amazing.

00:51:27
Speaker 3: One final question for you as you look forward to twenty twenty four. Here, are there any events that you have circled on your schedule that you're really excited from a photography perspective to attend.

00:51:40
Speaker 1: Well, starts off with AUGUSTA. I love the Masters.

00:51:43
Speaker 2: You know, I'm getting near to a milestone there, so my thirty ninth Masters this year, and bar those two COVID misses, I would have been past the forteen Masters milestone, which might get me a car parking space in the car park.

00:52:00
Speaker 1: But yeah, anyway, I'm really looking forward to that.

00:52:03
Speaker 2: Forget that comment, but yeah, it's that's going to be very exciting when I get to forty Masters, because to say that you walk up and down those hills forty times is actually quite an achievement, I think.

00:52:16
Speaker 1: So, yes, I'm looking forward to the Masters. I mean the Open I.

00:52:20
Speaker 2: Always look forward to, always, always, always, and then we've got Solheim Cup this year, this possibility I'm going to go to Paris for the Olympics, which might be fun, so we'll see. But definitely Masters, the Open, PGA Championship I love, and Valhalla brings to that great memories of Rory winning there his last major, so that'd be pretty poetic if he goes back there and wins another one. But I'd love him to win the Masters first because that would put him on a different level to all the others, wouldn't.

00:52:51
Speaker 3: It, And that would be a very fun celebration to photograph.

00:52:56
Speaker 1: Oh my goodness. Yeah.

00:52:58
Speaker 3: All right, well, David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. It was a real honor to talk to you and hope to see you out there at some point.

00:53:06
Speaker 1: Thank you, Garrett.

00:53:17
Speaker 3: This episode of the Friday Golf Podcast was produced by Matt Ruschius. Thank you, Matt. One quick thing that you can do that would really help us out is to rate and review our podcast. So just go to wherever you're listening to us, and if there's an opportunity to rate it, do that. If there's a place where you can review it, do that. We love hearing feedback from listeners. We always read it, we always get something from it, so that would be great. All right, that's it, thank you for listening, and we'll be back again soon with another episode.