LPGA Championship

Michelle Wie, U.S.

Leta Ladley, U.S.

Michele Redman, U.S.

Cindy LaCrosse (U.S.) and Yani Tseng 

Yani Tseng and her caddie, John Hamilton

The board

Yani Tseng, winner of the 2011 LPGA Championship, before teeing off at hole one.

Yesterday, I shot the LPGA tour for Golf Local and I learned: 

-I need a new backpack (i.e. one that can stay closed without caribiners)

-make a check list

-to remember tape

 -not to clean out my car without putting the essentials back in (such as  a knife and brush)

-put padding on the 20 lb. lens and monopod set-up I'll be carrying/bruising my collar bones with all day

-always keep $20 as extra cash somewhere in your car. You will never say, "Oh my gosh, if only I didn't have that extra money to get me through in a pinch!" You will regret not having it one day.

There were times during the day when we had to freeze for the golfer (they're irritatingly particular about silence and focus) and I rested my face on the 400mm lens like it was my friend. I love shooting now. However, as much as it was a cool experience and I'd take a freelance job shooting sports almost any day, I sat there and couldn't help but think how much money was being spent on the day. How much was wasted. 

The competing internet pages on my laptop were LPGA info, the websites of Getty photographers who'd been covering the event, and numerous online articles and photo essays on the growing shortage of food. Several thousand people will die today because they had no food. The photographs of war and famine I saw in the LIFE 1989 magazine as a kid have not led to solutions- more photographs of war and famine are being published now and the situation is continually worsening. It leaps and spreads from country to country like fire. It's predicted that we'll have two more billion people on the planet within 35 years and there won't be enough food for a lot of them. It's bleak. 

 I couldn't truly enjoy "documenting" the importance of golf when I'd trade a seat next to Scott Halleran any day for the freedom and wonder of being with refugees in Rochester or for future considerations, a cement house along a dirt road in Africa. Seriously, nothing is being published on albino Tanzanians being killed for their body parts in cultic rituals. There's a miracle man west of Arusha, west of The Mountain of God, who's 500 shilling cup of something is supposed to cure AIDs. 

This is good practice though. If I can't tell a story or make a photograph here I will be ill-equipped to accurately express any other kind of story. 

Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. 

-Daniel Burnham, Chicago architect