A Big Job

This is one of three photos I took of Petco Park, home field of the San Diego Padres, the morning that I left the city.  My entire time in San Diego, the mornings were overcast and dreary with just rotten light.  But on the last morning I woke up at 5:30AM (it takes my body awhile to adjust to local times), looked out the window, and saw a great, partly cloudy sky with nice colors in the clouds from the rising sun.  It was also ideal in that there wasn't that hazy low contrast sky that you get a lot on the coast; perhaps the rain the night before had cleared it up.  So I threw on some clothes as fast as I could and dashed out of the hotel (which is the big building in the background) and over to the ballpark.

As I said, this is one of three similar shots of the park.  I chose this one for the blog because I like the cleaning guy in the foreground.  It looks like he's cleaning the entire stadium by himself!  By the way, a couple nights before we took in a ballgame (versus Milwaukee).  The company had rented several suites in the Western Metal Supply building that you can see in the photo, and which is incorporated into the stadium design.  Apparently that's a result of the fact that the Western Metal Supply building was declared a historical landmark.  But only the exterior façade, which opened the way to including it as part of the structure and making it into a team store, private suites, restaurant and rooftop seating.  That's lemonade from lemons, folks (although I suppose it's debatable how much it aligns with the spirit of having historical landmarks).  Anyway, I got some game photos from the suite which were my first real stress test of the Nikon 55-300mm lens that I bought over a year ago.  Oh, I've used the lens, but I hadn't really pushed it's limits performance-wise until now.  I just don't use telephoto that often.  I'll probably post some of those photos, but for now I'll just say that it performed surprisingly well for a low budget ultra-telephoto zoom.