Project Log: Shooting the 2025 U.S. Open for USGA

The 2025 U.S. Open Champion, J.J. Spaun

If you're new here, a goal of mine for 2025 was to share more of my work via my site & social channels and leave less stuff sitting on hard drives that never sees the light of day. This "Project Log" series is part of my attempt to share more of what I'm up to on a regular basis besides just a few photos here and there on Instagram. If you're interested in seeing more of my projects, my blog is linked here.

I recently had the privilege of joining the USGA for the 2025 U.S. Open - Oakmont marked my 4th U.S. Open that I've had the pleasure to capture. All of the U.S. Open content that you see online is the product of an extremely talented team consisting of both in-house USGA staff members and freelancers like myself that are brought on for key events throughout the summer.

The Project: I was hired by the USGA to be part of their video team for both the U.S. Women's Open and U.S. Open Championships this year. The content you see on the U.S. Open Instagram is just the tip of the iceberg of what the video team does throughout the week - everyone wears a lot of hats and shoots/creates a wide variety of content. We shoot branded content, fly drones through hospitality tents, shoot & edit content for the USGA's archive, and much more. A few of us also shoot, voice caption, and transmit photos throughout the week in-between working on our normal video responsibilities.

I was on-site for 9 days (the Saturday before U.S. Open week through the final putt dropping on Sunday) and each day was completely different in terms of what I was shooting/creating. Here's some of my favorite pieces I had a chance to work on this year, in no particular order:

Winning Moment Reel - one of the things I look forward to the most throughout the week is our team's winning moment reel . As a team, we each take a designated zone around the 18th green to ensure we have 360 degree coverage of the final moment. This year's reel had footage contributed from 8 different shooters (Dave Evenson, Harvey Jamison, Brandon Giczewski, Tim Archibald, Ian Culley, Jay Passarella, Leia Schwartz, and myself) and was edited together by our team's extremely talented (and quick!) editor Johnny Randazzo. Here's the reel - it has been viewed almost 2 million times alone on Instagram at the time of this writing.

I was fortunate to have a great spot for this year's final putt, which comes down to quite a bit of luck/being in the right place at the right time. My full shot of the moment is below:

Player Check-In iPhone POV Reel - this next piece was a spur of the moment idea that came while working on finding a collection of U.S. Open & Oakmont logos in the clubhouse for another social edit. As an avid golf fan, I always love seeing the behind the scenes things normal fans typically don't get to experience. Mix that with iPhone style content that typically performs great on social, and you have a successful piece on your hands. This was shot using an iPhone POV lanyard off of Amazon. Always fun to get to pretend to be Scottie Scheffler, even if it's just for two minutes...

Rory & Scottie Range Reels - golf content with shot tracers is typically a great recipe for success on social and we applied that to these videos with two of the best ball strikers in the world. I had the pleasure of filming these two & Johnny Randazzo pieced together the final edits. As fun as these are to shoot, they are not always the easiest to capture - they require a little luck to catch the player during a range session where they don't have their coach/entourage stationed behind them.

Bryson Plays 1-3 at Oakmont - I spent a few holes walking the fairways with the Content King himself to create this shot-by-shot video. These videos are always a little more stressful to create in championship situations - we try to limit the impact to a player's routine, even in a practice round. Edit credit for this video again goes to Johnny.

Sunday 18th Green Hole Cutting iPhone POV - we had success with iPhone content throughout the week and the USGA team had the idea to apply it cutting the hole on 18 on Sunday. I broke out the iPhone POV lanyard and the guy cutting the hole did the rest of the work for me - his commentary helped make the video a winner.

Photos for Carousels/Graphics - as I mentioned above, some of us still shoot a bunch of photos throughout the week even though we are technically on the video team. These images are used for Instagram, Twitter, web, various graphics, and also put into the USGA's extensive digital archive. Samples of my photos from the week below - a larger gallery from Oakmont can be found here.

Video Carousels - we leaned into utilizing video clips on Instagram more at Oakmont than in past U.S. Opens. I personally really liked this simple 4x5 carousel of favorite shots from Brandon, Harvey, and I on Saturday (my clips in this one are slides 1, 2, 6-14, 16, and 17) .

Johnny also cooked up a really creative 16x9 carousel with footage from the team - the second slide in this one was my personal favorite of the creative framings he made and the 4th slide is one of my favorite clips I captured throughout the week.

All in all, it was another amazing week getting to join an extremely talented team at Oakmont. A huge thanks to the USGA for having me - I'm already looking forward to the next one. If you've made it this far and would like to see more of my work, you can check out the rest of my portfolio site here and other project debriefs like this one here.