Expanded Q&A with Evan Schiller
Read the full Q&A with Evan Schiller from the February/March 2021 issue of The Met Golfer.
Q: Does your knowledge of how to play your way around a course help you shoot it?
A: Yes. When you play a tournament, you play a practice round to familiarize yourself with the course. So whenever I get to a golf course to shoot it, I always scout it. That’s kind of my practice round. I usually like to arrive at a course in the middle of the day. I get a sense of the length of the course, the layout, and how to get around. But I also learn where the sun is, at what times, on what holes. Is the sun better on this hole in the morning or the afternoon?
I have this little App called Sun Seeker. It tells me where the sun is at certain times of day. Let’s say this one green is sitting back in the trees. I can take my Sun Seeker, stand in the middle of the green, and get a sense of when the sun is going to hit where the flag is. Sometimes I’ll ask the superintendent, Can you cut the flag here because it’s on the side of the green that’s going to be in the shade? Timing is very important with regard to light, so I always coordinate with the superintendent the night before and say, “Hey I’m going to shoot these holes in the morning.’’ We’re all coordinating this to get done before play.
Q: How did you start working with drones?
A: It was six, eight years ago. I kind of knew about them, but drones hadn’t come out in a way that the general public could buy them. I was going to do this shoot in northern Michigan, and the guy who hired me said, “We’ve got this guy [who] lives in Detroit [and] does a lot of drone work. He builds drones. We thought maybe you could coordinate with him and hook up your camera to his drone.”
My camera’s pretty expensive. My camera is five figures. And I’m thinking, What? Are you out of your mind? I don’t know this guy. And then he says to me, “He’s really good. He dropped out of school and started his own drone company. He’s only, like, 21.” And I’m thinking, Are you out of your mind? I’m going to put my $10-12,000 camera on this guy’s drone?
He says, “Well, just call him and see.” So I did. We hit it off and I liked him. I made sure my insurance was all set. We did the whole shoot for a week up there, hooking my camera up to his drone. I was like, “Wow, I like this.” He had to leave two days before I was done so I had to use a cherry picker [for the rest of the shoot]. I was like, “Wow, this is disappointing.”
Q: Have you gone back to many courses a second time? Do you find something different?
A: I usually go to Pebble once or twice a year and people say, “How many times can you photograph Pebble?” A lot. It’s always different. Different times of year, the weather’s different, there are different angles of the sun. The weather on the Monterey Peninsula changes. Even being there over a three-day span, it changes. Then you have renovations. Mountain Ridge, for instance. I photographed it three or four years ago. I walked out there and didn’t recognize the place.
To see more of Evan's work, click here to view shots he has taken of courses in the Met Area.