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Explore the best Open pictures by David Davies

Most sports are played in some kind of arena or stadium. This makes life relatively simple for sport photographers like David Davies. The action is confined to a single area, and the entire pitch can usually be captured with a wide shot.

But what about golf? Courses can occupy up to 150 acres of land with the photographer walking up to 11 miles a day – with all their gear too! It’s impossible to see everything with action taking place throughout the day all over the course.

PA would send up to three photographers and two editors to The Open to ensure as much action as possible is captured.

Even so, photographers have to navigate logistical challenges to ensure they’re following the right action. Sometimes, it’s hard to know who the eventual winner will be. Or there might be three different contenders who are all two-holes apart from each other.

David Davies has been covering The Open since 1995 so we spoke to him about his experiences over the years and how he navigates this logistical minefield.

MY: You’ve been a Sport Photographer at PA for 21 years now. Has covering golf events changed much over the years?

DD: In some ways yes. Our access to the greens is more limited now, especially with a course like St. Andrews with its double greens. We have always been allowed inside the spectator ropes, but we have a much tighter media route around the course now.

In the past, we had access to all tees and, more often than not, both sides of the tee. Now we have designated points to shoot from.

We have consultations with the R&A [organisers of The Open] photo liaison manager who, to be fair, tries to be as helpful as he can and accommodate as many position requests as possible.

We [PA], the international agencies, and golf photographers, generally have a meeting with him in October the year before and then a course visit in April to finalise things like tee and green positions, and also photo specific stands that we may request to get certain shots.

Like the 5^th tee at St Andrews, we had a stand there in the past that allowed us to get the town in the background, but we didn’t get that this year.

So yes, it has changed. It’s more restricted now but we are being helped to an extent to maintain a good standard of coverage. As all photographers would say though, it could always be better.

MY: Does The Open still feel as special as the first time you covered?

DD: I’d say yes. There are courses you look forward to more than others. St Andrews isn’t the greatest course to photograph apart from the signature shot around the 18^th tee. But that’s probably the most iconic Open picture I think there is and of course, there’s all the history right there in front of you.

That said, most Open courses are flat links courses that aren’t great to photograph but you do generally have one icon shot. It depends where the club house is in relation to the 18^th. At Portrush and Royal St. Georges you don’t see the club house as the 18^th is surrounded by temporary stands. Troon and Carnoustie are overlooked by the club house which can be incorporated into the pictures.

Portrush is great as the 5^th green, and 6^th tee were right over the beach with hills either side to shoot down from. There is always something to look forward to, but you get out what you put in. I do enjoy it a bit more if it’s in Scotland, but that might be more to do with the whisky!

There’s one thing I don’t look forward to and that’s the 5am alarm call and 14-hour days on Thursday and Friday when play tees off at 6.30am and we have to be there to cover that. I do think those two days are probably the hardest two working days of the year.Ìý

MY: The Old Course at St. Andrews is 7,305 yards long. On the final day, it seemed like Rory was going to clinch the win, but it wasn’t to be. How do you deal with this logistical nightmare when you’ve got two frontrunners on different holes?Ìý

DD: On Sunday morning, Richard Sellers, Jane Barlow, lead editor Matt Vincent, and I sat down and had a chat about how we thought the day would plan out. How would we get maximum coverage between us?

Plan A was to pick up the top three group of players on early holes so that we at least get one picture should one of the players make a charge. Once Rory came out, we’d have one photographer dedicated to his group.

Another photographer would then make their way to the 18^th green to see the last few groups finish their round. The other photographer would take a position in a grandstand to do a wider final shot showing the winning moment in situ, and another would follow the lead group to hole 18 with ground level photographers on each side of the green to get a reaction from both angles.

However, it became clear that at holes 10, 11 and 12 Cameron Smith was making a push for the lead which Rory was not responding to. Through the early part of the back nine it was possible for two photographers to work together between the two groups leap-frogging between greens and tees, but as it got to the last three holes a decision had to be made if we were to use the grandstand position on the 18^th green.

We had managed to be on the green for all four of Smith’s birdie putts to which he had not made any notable reaction but Rory was giving pictures of dejection so it was decided that if Smith was going to celebrate at all it would be on hole 18 which we had covered.

Also, we have more clients interested in Rory so we followed him to hole 18 to see how it played out. It has been a few years since I last saw a player really celebrate his victory and give us a memorable picture, so this was taken into consideration along with our client base thus the decision for the final holes was made by these factors.

MY: Is it annoying when you realise you’ve been following the runner-up rather than the eventual winner?

DD: It is when you miss a big picture (like when I put Tim Goode on the first corner at Silverstone last week) but as I said, I really didn’t think Smith was going to do anything. To be fair to him, Rory did still have to finish his round so he couldn’t have been certain of his win on the 18^th green as he putted.

Rory was always going to be the story from our point of view in so much as him losing The Open, not Smith winning it. Then it just became a case of trying to get a good dejection reaction or hopefully something more thought out, like the picture of him walking reflectively over the Swilken Bridge.

I captioned it ‘Bridge of Sighs’ on my and on Monday the tabloids used it as ‘Bridge too far’. I just got lucky that his body language looked sad and that it was a clean shot of him walking over the bridge as there’s a bit of a stampede up the 18^th fairway with the final group.

I suppose I started that round thinking of where the winning moment may be for Rory and how we were going to cover that, but in those last few holes had to change my mindset to illustrate how The Open had slipped away from him.

I may have been in the ‘wrong’ place for the winner, but from our British and Irish standpoint, you could argue I was actually in the right place.

MY: St. Andrews looks like such a beautiful place to shoot. And so historically important for golf. Obviously, all the important moments and action needs to be captured for news outlets. But what else are you looking for when covering golf tournaments? How important are those big vista shots for you?

DD: St Andrews is actually quite flat and the only elevation you get is on the temporary stands. Around holes 8, 9 and 10 where it runs along the estuary, it is beautiful.

Fortunately, we had a position on the 11^th tee grandstand overlooking the 7^th, 8^th, 10^th and 11^th with the estuary behind it. You do really need to pick your time to go there, when the light is right or if you have some dramatic sky and cloud cover and then preferably the right group of players on the green.

I do prefer the Opens in Scotland; they feel more rugged for some reason, probably those dramatic skies. When I first covered The Open it was on film and before the need to wire pictures to the site. We would drive back from Scotland with a big bag full of film on Sunday night and drop it into the processors about 6am in London.

We’d find somewhere for breakfast, collect the film, and then spend a good few hours going through all the film building sheets of slides telling the story of that Open. That principle of building a set and telling the story I still apply to my coverage today. I do that on a day-to-day basis now with the need for an immediate turnaround, but the principle is basically the same and that means you need a varied, interesting set.

At Portrush for example, the editors wanted to follow the final group on every green. But as I mentioned earlier, the 5^th and 6^th were right on the beach, and as I’ve also mentioned, the players just don’t celebrate like they used to. So it gives you the opportunity to take a chance and look for something unusual that makes the final round look a bit different from the rest.

This year was the 150^th Open and the 18^th at St. Andrews is one of most iconic holes in world golf. I knew of a couple of angles from the back of the 17^th green grandstand and then looked up the 1^st and 18^th stands to see how they looked to show where it was being played. A colleague once said to me ‘the bigger the event the wider you shoot it’ to show the whole thing in situ. The 150^th Open at St Andrews is a perfect example of that.

Explore the best Open pictures by David Davies