Seahawks Playoff Game (with pictures)

[Gerryatrics]

It was overcast, wet, dark and overall not the best conditions for picture taking, so the quality of most of the pictures, quite frankly, sucks. They are shrunk down to 20% of their original size, which also doesn't help. The pictures have not been touched up at all, if you have a problem with the levels or think some of the pictures should be cropped or whatever, I'll e-mail you the originals and you can take the time to fix them. All that said, here's my little report.

Tickets sold out in about nine minutes for the game, but I managed to snag one. I had to wake up at some ungodly hour of the morning, I think around 9:00 AM, to get ready for the game. I headed to Bremerton and got on the ferry to Seattle.



Somewhere shortly after departure a couple of Coast Guard patrol boats started shadowing the ferry.



They took up positions on either side of the ferry, any time a boat started to pass the ferry one of the boats would race ahead, intercept the boat and escort them past. It was cool, but it made you wonder if they were doing it because it was a random patrol, training, or because there was a specific threat against the ferry. Fortunately the ferry, and thus I, did not blow up.



As you can see from this picture, the weather sucked. It was overcast, but it didn't actually start raining until around the time the game started. Anyway, that's the Space Needle as seen from the ferry pulling into Seattle. You can sort of see the 12th Man flag.



There aren't a whole lot of large parking lots around the stadiums, so the biggest collection of tailgaters I saw was in this parking "strip" between rows of warehouses. The tents went all the way to that red building. There were only two tents that I saw that were Redskins fans, but there were a large knot of fans about halfway through. I guess they were huddled together for protection, you know, herd mentality.



I never really noticed, but apparently Seattle Horse Cops wear capes.



The Blue Thunder Drum... group of some sort. Not really the most impressive collection of percussionists the world has ever seen, but they aren't too bad.



An action shot of Blue Thunder before they reached the Stadium.

[Gerryatrics]

This is my dog: Chi-Chi. He doesn't have anything to do with the game, the picture was just on the same memory card.



Some of the more famous Seahawks fans... Painted Hawk...



Mr. and Mrs. Seahawk...



Mrs. Seahawk and Kiltman.



Here's Qwest Field. I don't know what those circle thins are supposed to represent, but they're ugly. You can see the roof of SafeCo Field in the background.



Why the Seahawks are on their way to the Superbowl.



A look at the field before the game. That's about the same angle as from my seat, but I was another 100 feet or so up.



A look at some of the field and the other half of the stadium. That place was rocking.



Another look at the other side of the stadium.



And a shot from when it started getting dark.

[Gerryatrics]

My seat was in the third level, twenty-somethingth row. The seat was also about five or ten yards behind the back of the endzone, which made trying to figure out yardage on the other side of the field a pain. At that angle the whole field becomes an optical illusion. The seats are really packed together, I was jammed in between two large guys, and we got intimately acquainted with each other. Every time everybody stood up, I had to stand at an angle to be able to fit between the other people in the row. The other thing that sucked was I could not hear the PA announcer at all. I had no idea what was happening with subs utions and who was involved in the play, and I had to interpret the penalties by the ref's hand gestures and the roar from crowd. It was loud by the way, loud as , crazy painful loud. The whole crowd stood when the Seahawks were on defense and made as much noise as humanly possible. The fans are really taking the 12th Man thing seriously.



They had a 30th anniversary tribute thing at half time. My childhood hero, Steve Largent, was there. I wasn't able to get a good pic though.



They also had a tribute to Dave Brown, who passed away recently. http://www.seahawks.com/ardisplay.aspx?ID=6403

Dave Brown
1953-2006
RIP

Some pics of the actual game. Keep in mind I was really far away when I took these pics.









Mike Holmgren and Paul Allen after the game. I got fed up with trying to get decent pics of action on the field, so I just started taking pictures of the big screen.



The End.

[ShoogarBear]

Those are very nice pics, even the game action ones. What kind of optical zoom did you have?

[Gerryatrics]

10x That was the most important thing when I was looking for a new camera. I'm poor and always end up in the upper level of whatever various games I attend, so I figured the only way I could get halfway decent pics was with a camera with gobs of optical zoom. It would have cost almost as much as the camera did to get a nice zoom lens for my SLR, so I killed a couple of birds with one stone, a nice digital camera and enough optical zoom for long range pictures.

[ShoogarBear]

Will they let you bring detachable zoom lenses into an NFL game? Because they won't let you bring one into an NBA arena.

[scott]

Sweet pics!

[ALVAREZ6]

Nice pics!!!!

[tlongII]

Very nice pics!

[TheTruth]

Nice Pics.

Gotta love the teams they played at home. No wonder they went 8-0.

[Gerryatrics]

Thanks ShoogarBear, Scott, Alveraz, Tlong and The Truth.

Unfortunately it looks like I'm not going to get any pictures of the NFC Championship game. I was on Ticketmaster hitting refresh until the purchase tickets thing came up at 10:00. I selected one ticket for the lowest price level right away. It went to the checking for tickets screen for a couple of minutes before it said the tickets weren't available. I didn't have a chance to look for another level, the tickets were sold out in about five minutes. I can't afford the marked up ticket prices, and I don't know anyone with an extra ticket, so I'll probably be watching the game at home.

Will they let you bring detachable zoom lenses into an NFL game? Because they won't let you bring one into an NBA arena.

Probably not, but I'm not sure. My digital camera has a fixed lens, plus it was jammed into my coat pocket, so security never got a look at it. I know some places ban all professional style cameras, which might include a camera with a 10X lens.