An Unexpected Frame-Worthy Georgia Bulldogs Photograph (Picture of the Week)
I don’t take this route very often. But last week, I was heading to a boutique in downtown Athens to purchase a Christmas gift for my wife and daughter. I figured the students were gone, campus traffic would be next to non-existent and wanted to take a road less traveled.
Sanford Stadium has three roads running by it. Field Street on the south side, Sanford Drive and the famous bridge on the west side, and East Campus Road on the east side.
Since I always carry a camera with me, I was ready for a photo, but not ready all at the same time. As I crested the hill right at the spot that River Road intersects with East Campus Road I immediately noticed the championship years of 1942, 1980, and 2021 flanking the back of the stadium. I was well aware of the flags flying on top of the east end zone but had not seen these artistically displayed vertical banners that the UGA Athletic Department had installed.
I grabbed my Canon G7X Mark II sitting next to me in the passenger seat and fired off two quick photos through my windshield. I wasn’t sure if it was any good as I had to keep driving. But I had a feeling one of them would be pretty cool.
As I got home and loaded the photos into Lightroom, I did have a good one. The only problem was there was a construction crew doing some work and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to keep all of that distraction in it and present it as it was taken? I chose instead to to a bit of Photoshop editing with the clone stamp and content-aware tool.
Original image before cropping and Photoshop
I removed all of the road distractions of asphalt repair and the construction worker. Also, a light pole had to be removed simply because I couldn’t get a clean edit working around it.
In the end, I had a really cool photo that did very well on social media. It received 104 likes, a few comments, one share, and six saves on Instagram, which is pretty good. But, on Twitter it really blew up - garnering over 20,000 impressions, 244 likes, 18 retweets (including a retweet by UGA) and a few comments.
I really do love this photo. One, because it reminds me of going to buy a gift for two very special people in my life, and two, because it obviously meant something to others who viewed it on social media. Anytime you can “stop the scroll” and get someone to interact and appreciate a photo, from a photographer’s perspective - that’s a really cool thing to be able to do in my opinion.
If you’d like to purchase this print or any of my other prints, head on over to my web store and place an order. All of my prints come signed on the front and a date the photograph was taken on the back.