Mississippi Dunes Golf Links...Part 1

Or My Adventures Into Golf Course Photography

It’s like it was yesterday, not 15 years ago.

A poorly assembled set of screen shots of Mississippi Dunes from the sky. I’ll have to make adjustments later.

According to the internets, Mississippi Dunes Golf Links opened up in 1995. The dream of one Dr. William Doebler; he would be the brainchild behind the course opening as well as the reason the course closed. With help from Dave Tentis as well as inviting members of Pete Dye’s and Greg Norman’s design teams out to pick their brains about how to build the course, The Dunes was a course that definitely was different than the rest around the Twin Cities.

I’d been playing Mississippi Dunes off and on for a few years and I always liked playing the course. There were a lot of unique features; deep pot bunkers, often lined on the back with railroad ties at an angle that would either grab your ball (if you were unlucky to hit between the ties) or launch it forward over the bunkers. Playing The Dunes was a treat for me; I’d been playing local courses and not paying anything over $25 for a round usually, so when I’d go to The Dunes and play and pay around $50, it was a special treat that I only did a few times a year.

First hole at Mississippi Dunes.

I’d been out to the course with my camera once or twice while playing and showed someone at the course (I’m assuming it was Dennis, one of the GMs that were there) and I was asked about photographing the course for them. And truth be told, Mississippi Dunes was the first golf course that paid me to photograph it. How much? Actually, I don’t even remember. It wasn’t that much compared to the time and quantity of images I shot there, but I was in. I was photographing a golf course for the course and not just chasing landscape shots for use in agriculture marketing or creating pretty scenes of the North Shore.

Hole 18 (which was the 9th for a while until they changed some of the routing).

It was an absolute blast though, running around a golf course with my camera gear and trying to get the right shots. Having played there I had an idea of what I wanted to photograph, and where to photograph it from. Not all turned out that great; actually there are only a handful of images that I still do like from when I shot the course and I used two of them for my marketing, one being the shot above.

I remember one of my visits there; I’d not only brought my digital camera equipment but I also brought some film equipment. I’d had cameras and lenses spread out across the golf cart. When packing up my gear, I’d forgotten a film camera body in the passenger side cubby and had to run back from my car to retrieve it. Somewhere I’ve got the negatives from that day, stored in a binder.

I’d been working a full-time job as well as doing the golf course photography on the side for several years, when I heard that there was a lawsuit against “Doc” and the Dunes was closing.

I’ll continue that in my next post. Until, then, subscribe to learn more!