Feeding Your Golf Addiction In the Winter Part 12: Organize Your Golf Photos

This is the twelfth in a series on ways to feed your golf addiction in the off-season:

Browse and Organize Your Golf Photos

I take a camera with me on every round—and you should, too. There’s always a great picture or two waiting, and it’s a great way to remember warmer days during the off season.

On most rounds, I take my Canon EOS Rebel Xsi with a 18-55mm lens and a polarizing filter. It fits very comfortably into one of the side pockets of my golf bag. At other times, it’s the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS1, which is much smaller and actually pocketable.

Over the summer, I accumulate many hundreds of shots from the courses I play. Along with my scorecards and notes, they serve as the memory of my golfing life. Most of those photos are landscapes, but I also get quite a few wildlife photos and what I call “golf illustrations”—photos of the mundane: rakes, balls, rows of carts lined up and the like.

The offseason, then, is my opportunity to sort, edit and organize all of those shots. My tool of choice for that is Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2. It’s the little brother of Adobe Photoshop in terms of photo retouching, but with organizing tools built in. One of the best features is the ability to rate and tag photos. That lets me search for, and easily find photos when I need them later.

A good many of the photos I take end up here on Golf Blogger. Others find their way on my computer screen as wallpapers and screensavers, into the GolfBlogger Michigan Calendar, and onto note cards that I make on my printer.

But mostly, they’re just a lot of fun to look at on cold wintry days as a way to feed my golf addiction.