June was another very busy month especially as I had to organise a 12 day road trip which saw me visiting 5 MacDonald Hotel golf courses throughout the UK and three courses in France.

My first course was the stunning Spey Valley in the Scottish Highlands. My flight into Inverness was delayed by two and a half hours and was made worse by rentalcars cancelling my car hire booking.

So after these little set backs I made my way to Spey Valley hoping that the weather would improve and that I would get some good evening light. Sadly the sun didn’t shine that evening and so I had to make do with some very moody light and hoped that the morning light would be better.

As you can see from the images the light wasn’t on my side. And so I moved on knowing that I would need to return and have a second go at shooting this great course.

My next location was Cardrona which is further South by the borders. Again a great course with Stunning backdrops. The light was good and I managed to cover the shoot in two sessions.

From here I drove down to Linden Hall via a visit to Gullane where I met up with the secretary to organise a shoot for them during the Scottish Open.

Linden Hall is just north of Newcastle. The course is a very pretty Parkland layout with some really strong par 3’s. I finished up here early on the Sunday morning and made my way to Newcastle to drop off the car and get the train back down to Sussex.

It’s actually a very good way to travel and one which I might consider for future trips.

The next day saw me packing up my car and getting back on the road to the next venue which was Hill Valley in Whitchurch, Shropshire. Apparently Hill Valley was the home course of Ian Woosnam before he turned professional, It’s now a very lush parkland layout where the many newly planted trees have matured and made it into a very tight interesting course.

My last venue for MacDonald was just up the road. Portal has two courses but my brief was to shoot the main course where at one point you can look over five counties. Again another very strong layout.

So that was my brief completed.  However my trip wasn’t yet over, on my way back I had another project to shoot, Little Aston Golf club. This has been on my radar for a few years and it was great to get the commission to provide some new collateral images for their website. It’s a very traditional members course and as you would expect, was in great condition.

So that was my road trip over, well almost, MacDonald Hotels have asked me to go back to Spey Valley and reshoot and also asked me to shoot the second course at Portal! This I’m going to do on my next 12 day road trip which starts on Wednesday on my way up to Gullane and then onto St Andrews for the Open.