The photographs a golf course actually needs

Most courses have forty photographs of the same par three, all taken at noon in July, and almost nothing else. It is an easy trap. That hole is the prettiest thing on the property, so it is the thing everybody points a camera at.

The problem is that a website does not need forty versions of your best hole. It needs about twenty five specific pictures, most of which are not of golf holes at all.

The shot list

The one everything hangs on

One wide, horizontal image of the course looking its best, with room across the top and left where a headline and a booking form will sit. Shot in the last ninety minutes of daylight. This is the picture the home page is built around, and if it is wrong the whole site feels wrong. Budget the most effort here and get several frames.

The place, not just the holes

• The clubhouse from the parking lot. This is the first thing a first-time golfer sees in real life, and it reassures them they are in the right place.
• The pro shop interior. Lit, tidy, a person behind the counter.
• The first tee. Not empty. With a group on it.
• The practice area. Range, short game, putting green.
• Carts, staged and clean.
• The grill or bar, with food on a table and people at it.
• The event space, set for an outing and set for a wedding if you do them. These two shots sell more banquet business than any paragraph you could write.

Holes, but fewer than you think

Three to six holes, chosen because they are different from each other rather than because they are all beautiful. A long par four, a short par three over water, an approach that shows elevation. If every hole picture shows the same kind of shot, the course reads as one-note to somebody who has never played it.

People

The hardest to get and the most valuable. Four golfers who look like your actual golfers, walking off a green. A starter talking to a group. Somebody behind the counter who is not staring at a camera. A course with no people in its photographs reads as empty, and empty is the one thing you never want to suggest.

Get a signed release for anyone recognizable. It takes a minute and it saves an awkward conversation later.

Seasons

If you are somewhere with a real autumn, shoot it. Fall golf photographs are the most persuasive images a northern course owns and they are usable for about two weeks a year. Put it in the calendar now.

What makes them usable on a website

A photograph can be gorgeous and still be useless to the person building the site.

• Shoot horizontal. A website is a wide rectangle. A tall photograph has to be cropped to fit, and you lose the sky or the fairway, which is usually the reason you took it.
• Leave empty space. Sky, fairway, water. Type has to go somewhere, and a picture with no quiet area means the headline sits on top of a bunker.
• Shoot wider than the shot you want. The same image gets cropped square for social, wide for a banner and tall for a phone. Room at the edges is what makes one photograph do three jobs.
• Give us the originals. Full size, straight off the camera. A picture that has already been shrunk for Facebook cannot be made bigger again.
• Note the time of day. A morning set and an evening set do not mix in one row on a page. They will read as two different courses.

Noon in full sun is the worst light on a golf course and it is when almost every course photograph gets taken, because that is when somebody has a free hour.

Drone, and when it earns its keep

Aerial footage is worth it for a routing that cannot be understood from the ground: an island green, a dramatic elevation change, holes that run along water. It is not worth it as a slow pan over a flat property, which is the drone video every course has and nobody watches to the end.

One thing to check before you book: whoever flies it needs to be licensed for commercial work, and some properties sit inside airspace that needs authorization. Ask, rather than finding out afterwards.

Doing it yourself

A recent phone in good light beats a professional camera in bad light, so if the budget is not there this year, the answer is not to give up. It is to go out on the right evening. Shoot in the last hour of daylight, hold the phone level, use the main lens rather than the zoom, and take far more frames than you think you need.

Then do the part everybody skips: put them somewhere organized, named, at full size. A folder of two hundred unnamed images on somebody's phone is not a photo library, and when the website needs a picture of the grill in February, nobody will find it.