Golf and photo taking after dinner last night.

How I love these late night holes of golf on the Arnold Palmer course. We play without another golfer in view. I like the freedom to hit another ball so I can focus on practicing the swing changes I'm working on with Ray's help. Mike, who teaches Ray and I, is out of town. I am finally getting a sense of where I'm going wrong with the basically flawed swing concepts that are well ingrained in my muscle memory do to many previous years of swinging incorrectly.

Concepts/beliefs are funny things. A teacher tells me to drive with my legs......I do but then spin out because my legs and hips are open and ahead of my upper body and arms....I hit from the top throwing my arms out away from myself because I feel blocked. Another teacher tells me to stay behind the ball.......I try this but now I rarely get to my left side anymore, and again feel blocked. I'm not saying it is the teacher's fault, I'm saying my mind hears what it wants and believes I'm doing what I'm told. Geesh. I try hard, but if I can't see that I'm not doing what someone wants then I'm reinforcing lots of bad moves at the ball unknowingly.

Ray has been great at trying to get me to see I'm not getting the club up in the correct plane on the back swing and, that in the down swing, I am still hitting from the top, not letting the club fall on its own, close in right by my right hip. I have so much trouble giving up control that my hands death grip the club. Somewhere in this flawed thinking, I believe hand and arm strength will make the club swing properly. No wonder I have knots on top of both shoulders and a stiff neck. Trusting is hard. The day I give up fighting physics is the day I know I'll shoot in the 80's again.

Good news is I am finally able to feel where I'm going wrong. Bad news is making the right moves after years of doing the wrong things in the swing takes time and PATIENCE.

I brought my Canon D40 fitted with the 50mm 1.4 lens. Once the sky started changing color I had trouble deciding which I wanted to do more.....hit the ball or click the shutter. I see it's difficult with the wider open apertures and shallow depth of field to get a close up silhouette, like Ray, in focus. If I use a smaller aperture, I can't hand hold the camera for an in focus shot. Hmmmmm. I need to experiment and learn more about this lens.

A quick shadow shot of myself in the golf cart. I wish I'd taken more time and included the golf clubs on the back of the cart and had more separation in my leg on the dash and the steering wheel.

The evening sprinklers came on or we'd kept playing until pitch dark.
I'm thrilled to be so excited about something again.