CaryEdmondson.com

I’m a big fan of Christmas… more so than birthdays or any other events that take place throughout the rest of the year. So it took a lot for me to put the Colts-Raiders game on my calendar since it took place the day after Christmas. But since I had yet to ever shoot Colts quarterback, and future Hall of Famer Peyton Manning… I decided to make the sacrifice and leave home late Christmas night.

It wasn’t the greatest of games for Peyton, but my favorite moment, and photograph for that matter… came with time running out in the fourth quarter. The Colts were holding on to a slim lead, and all they needed to do was pick up a first down to secure the win. Anyone who has ever watched Peyton play knows he’s not known for his running abilities, but on this third down, the Colts tricked the Raiders and had Peyton run a bootleg. It worked even better than they had hoped as he ran down the sidelines for a big gain before sliding just short of the endzone. After the play was over, his teammates were excited and congratulated him just as he came into a spot on the field where the light was shining right on him. It made for a great picture and I was happy to go home knowing I got a few decent shots of Peyton to add to my collection.

When the colors change on campus each year at CSU Stanislaus the campus looks amazing. Towards the end of November and into the start of December I make sure to get out of the office a bit more to capture the scenery. This year I decided to try something new and take some panoramic photos of the campus. So I stitched together photos using Photoshop, … where in some cases the final photo is really made up of 30-40 separate images. Here are a few of my favorites from the experiment.

I saw that ESPN.com put up one of my photos of Tim Tebow from Sunday’s Raiders game on “Page 2″ of their site. It’s a section of their site which ask fans to fill in the caption as they see fit. (– for anyone who doesn’t know the background behind Tim Tebow… he just made his first NFL start on Sunday and is best known for being a very emotional player in college who also has some very strong religious beliefs–) So needless to say… there have been a variety of captions that have be submitted online. Some of the comments are pretty funny I have to admit… but you can be the judge of that. If you want to submit your own caption… just click on the following link to add your comment to the list: http://espn.go.com/espn/page2/index?id=5938759

Finally! … I’m blogging again. I took a break from the blogging to finish editing my recent wedding photos so that I could get everything shipped out by Christmas (… 5 wedding shoots in 6 weeks creates quite a workload to go with the sporting events and the day job).

But I had a great time shooting the 49ers game this past Sunday. Midway through the second quarter I was thinking to myself… “I have enough good photos to quit shooting for the day already if I wanted to.” (… though that still wasn’t enough reason to stop shooting for the afternoon).

As most photographers know, it’s amazing how much easier it is to consistently take good photos when teams score a lot of points. I think the 49ers put up 30 points on the Seahawks… and that was just in the first half! I’d be thrilled if the 49ers could manage to score 30 points a game throughout the season. It makes life, and the pictures, a whole lot more enjoyable when a lot of points are being scored by both teams. Unfortunately… there is only one more 49ers home game remaining for the rest of the season,… so I can only hope that they spoil me again one more time before the season is finished.