A Look Back At My Favorite Stadium Photos Of 2023

This is always a fun list to prepare for every year. It combines my love of landscape photography and sports photography. This year the list looks a little different than it has in years past. What I am doing is shifting and therefore so are the venues that I am in often. It is always fun to see something cool happening and plan for a photo to

We will start the list with an amazing moment for the Purdue women’s team. They had not sold out a game since I went to school at Purdue. That was a long time ago if you don’t know. I really think that this team is on the rise, and it will be amazing to see if they can start filling up the stands even more. I imagine when Caitlin Clark comes to town they have a decent shot to get close to a sellout.

This is the third time at least that this photo has appeared on one of these year end lists. I really like that I made this with a film camera. I had to wait a while to know if it turned out. That is not something that I am used to with sports photography. I also got to make this photo with my Canon 11-24mm lens which I used to love to use. It is a heavy beast, but man does it give you good results. I need to work that lens and some film photos into my games more.

It was so cool to see Indiana State hosting the NCAA Tournament this year. That baseball program has worked its butt off, and they were rewarded with a first round hosting chance. They actually could have hosted the next round as well, but that is another story. I made this photo during the National Anthem to show that amazing crowd in all blue that showed up for their team. I have been lucky enough to photograph this tournament five times now. The fifth time was the most special because it was in a place that I have made a lot of photos. Lets do this again soon!

I make so many photos in Loeb Stadium that I am bound to make a good sunset photo at some point. It is a great way to spend my summer every year. I still don’t know if I have made a great sunset photo here yet. I need to find that special angle to do something really cool.

The Mackey t-shirt game is one of my favorites to photograph. I have photographed it every year since they started doing them in 2013. Last year I didn’t have a pass to get my camera in for most of the season, but I was lucky to get one for this game. It is fun to look at the design and decide where I should stand every year. I can’t wait to see what the design is this year.

This year Ross Ade Stadium had a very new look to it. I tried to make some photos from different angles to show off the new look. Above are some of my favorites from the season.

This year I took the drone over to Bob Friend Field to make a few photos of the senior numbers on the field ahead of senior day. I covered this team the entire season, and it was sad to see the seniors go.

This year I was lucky enough to cover the Big Ten Tennis Championships that were held here at Purdue. This was one of the events that was cancelled in 2020 when everything shut down so it was cool to get to finally do it. One night after a long day of photography I walked out to see this awesome blue sky. I pulled my camera out of my bag to make one last photo.

I was in Bittinger Stadium photographing for the opponent when this opportunity came to make a fun photo during blue hour. A home run celebration with that awesome sky was too cool not to make a photo of.

John Wooden is a popular feature of campus that I photograph. Above are two of my favorite images from the past year. The first is a long exposure from a cloudy, windy day. I liked the clouds streaking by. The second was during a lunar halo. I was trying to find anything that I could put in the foreground of this thing, and John was a very good subject. He always takes direction very well. Here I needed him to sit still for a long period for both photos, and he did a great job of it.

The Boilermaker statue is another place that I like to drive up to make photos of. It is fairly close to home so when something is happening I can get there quickly. Here are a couple of my favorites from the statue from this past year. The first is a long exposure of the international space station flying overhead. A Boilermaker was in the space station so I thought that the Boilermaker statue was a good place to photograph the space station from. The second is one of those nights when I saw a sunset about to happen and quickly got to campus. I can park fairly close to this part of campus so it made sense to make this photo there.

Tyler Trent passed a little over five years ago now. His mark is still all over campus. From the people that he touched to the memorials that we have put in place for him. I love how they moved his gate over a big allowing me to make this photo.

I have to end this list with a stadium photo, but no game happening in it. This year we travelled to Cincinnati, Ohio to be a part of the Taylor Swift Eras Tour that was there. On night one we joined many people outside listening to the concert. On the second night my oldest and a friend went inside of the stadium, and we were outside again. The great part about seeing the show outside two nights in a row is that I knew what to expect. I had a spot picked out, and I made this photo a Karma the final song was playing. It is technically a stadium photo, and a great night and weekend for our family. That was a very fun trip that I was happy to make a photo of. The fun part about this photo is that I made a similar photo to this on night one. I knew to wait in this spot though for the finale for an even better photo.

As I look at this list I realized that for the first time in a decade that Holloway Gymnasium and Folk Field are not on the list. I really didn’t spend much time in either of them this year. What I do has slightly changed moving me away from those venues. Alexander Field is also missing from the list. Maybe it is a good thing to make these lists a little fresher. As I said above this is always one of my favorite lists to make photos for, and to put together every year.