GREENSBORO, GEORGIA | With the golden hour losing its delicate glow, Channing Benjamin puts away his camera and drone in favor of a golf club. It’s a momentary trade.
Shortly after he leaves the first tee, Benjamin is immediately searching for something. He’s usually not looking too hard for his golf ball given that he is a phenomenal player – on this day at Reynolds Lake Oconee’s Preserve Course, he collects six birdies on the front nine alone – but he is seeking more than circles on a scorecard.
What he wants is harder to measure.
For Benjamin, one of the world’s most prominent and admired golf course photographers, he sees the game in shades of light, times of day and insightful angles. The personality of a hole is altered by the minute, its charm unlocked by uncommon perspectives. To capture them, he’s standing on top of a golf-cart roof, lurking in the woods well off the beaten path and inspecting a bird’s-eye view from a camera whizzing furiously well above him in the sky.
It’s an obsession, an endless hunt to discover the height of beauty for a subject in a constant state of change. He’s trusted by many to do it better than nearly anyone else. Benjamin is one of the few licensed photographers for the Pebble Beach Company, and his work is commonly found in major golf publications and programs for big tournaments. His Instagram account has more than 41,000 followers as photos from his many travels are shown in their breathtaking colors. Comments come streaming in from people who are struck by his creativity and want to learn how they can discover their own type of magic golf photography.
This all came on so suddenly for the 50-year-old from Palm Springs, California, who used to direct concerts and videos for the likes of Bob Dylan, Prince, Britney Spears, NSYNC and Fleetwood Mac. He also spent several years as a video director for the NBA’s Indiana Pacers. Over time, Benjamin gradually left those pursuits and picked up work for Roger Dunn Golf. He grew to enjoy taking innovative smartphone pictures while playing golf across California, and by the time he bought his first camera in 2014, Benjamin started to cultivate a sense of what makes a meaningful golf-course image.
“I'm more of a visual artist and I was a video director for years, so I had camera guys and I had engineers and I would tell them what to do,” Benjamin said. “I didn't know how to work a camera, but I knew what I was looking for. I could explain it. So, when all that changed and I decided to pick up a camera myself, it was a little overwhelming, because I'm like, ‘Oh, God, I don't know what I'm doing.’ ”
That overwhelming pursuit has turned into an undeniable talent. Benjamin recently took a stunning shot of the foggy 14th hole at Spyglass Hill – a hole and course that has been photographed heavily over the years – and the marketing team representing the course couldn’t identify which hole it was. Moments like this are a reminder that it’s not just about shooting a pretty hole in the right light; any new angle is an opportunity to illuminate a golf course’s personality.
Hoping to share his abilities and passion with like-minded golf and photography lovers, Benjamin began The Golfography Experience in 2019. The classes come in the form of weekend getaways in which a small group travels with Benjamin for sunrise shoots and in-depth discussions about the meaning of golf photography. One of the recent classes came at Reynolds Lake Oconee, an expansive property with more than 100 holes of golf and plenty of opportunities for learning the subtleties of the art form.
Do you know how golfers often see their own made-up golf holes using tees and greens that don’t correspond with one another? Golfography asks for those same imaginative skills.
“People can experience a dream, playing golf at a place as magnificent as this and having a day of sunrise photoshoots and maybe some training,” Benjamin said. “And it's been going great for a few years. People love the concept. It's the only one in the world that I know of where you can go to a photography workshop like this and have it be experiential. It's not sitting in a conference room; it is going out there, playing, hanging with some like-minded people enjoying the game.
“Golfography is the fusion of the game, the lifestyle and the art. For me, it's been a way to connect with people that I may not have had the chance to meet if it weren’t for this.”
One morning, Benjamin rode around with participants at The National, stopping on a picturesque par-3 bordered by water. The air was completely still with not a ripple on the lake, the dew on the grass virtually untouched. In the background, not terribly far from the green, there were two fishermen in a boat.
“This is the money shot,” Benjamin said.
A couple of holes later, he delved into the concept of layering. On one par-4, he explained how he will take five different photos from one spot using the different layers the course provides. One will focus on the fairway bunker in the foreground, while others will focus on the clubhouse in the background.
At one point he saw the green to a hole on a completely different course, about 100 yards away. The angle of the photo came from the exact opposite side of the hole’s fairway, but this shot was over water to a green with trees on either side. Do you know how golfers often see their own made-up golf holes using tees and greens that don’t correspond with one another? Golfography asks for those same imaginative skills.
It’s difficult to describe the art form in technical terms. There is a certain intuition involved, and growth can come only from curiosity and experimentation. Still, no matter how much of a novice you are, golfography invites the possibility for anyone to take an incredible photo if they seek out the right conditions. In that way, it’s very similar to the game itself.
... you may not think you are interested in golf art, but there’s a good chance that you already are.
One of the joys of attending the class was not only seeing Benjamin’s process, but getting to compare that with attendee Jennipher Satterly, a painter who now exclusively focuses on golf-course art. It was interesting that she goes about creating her paintings by taking different elements of several photos from similar locations – for instance, she might choose a brighter sky instead of overcast clouds while keeping the same tone of green. Clouds, as it turns out, are also the toughest element to paint.
Satterly is a passionate golfer, and like Benjamin, she senses a larger concept at play when she can capture a course in a vibrant painting. She is also a Pebble Beach licensee and had the honor of creating the cover art for the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am program. The painting is of the third hole at Spyglass Hill, an ominous sky hanging over the Pacific Ocean in the background. In the foreground, there is a wild sea of vegetation.
We may not always register those moments as golfers, but seeing a descriptive painting like that makes us feel something.
“There’s an extraordinary opportunity to celebrate the game,” Satterly said. “And there's a sense of community that I found doing this, and that it's incredibly rewarding. For me to find something that I've done my entire life, the two loves that I've had for my entire life … they are finally kind of together. It's effortless. It just happens. I kind of sit back and I watch all that happen. I love what I do.”
There are a few lessons to be taken from a class such as this one.
The first is that you may not think you are interested in golf art, but there’s a good chance that you already are. The core of great golfography is already at the core of why we all love the game.
Being out there early in the morning or late evening, often without clubs, makes you a more objective viewer of the course and the game. A golf course is so peaceful in those golden hours. We know the game is cruel and unrelenting, its difficulty unmatched, but it’s also a reminder that the course is a living and breathing character in the play.
For a moment, your only thought is about how you can best capture that.
Top: Reynolds Lake Oconee
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