Taking a camera to a baseball game is something I’ve done for as long as I can remember. Give me a seat, a scorecard and a camera and I’m set at a ballgame, no matter where, when or how long it is.
When I was younger, I would bring the camera I had inherited from my grandpa, which used a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk as its memory card, with all 1.44 MB of space. Now, a photo in my camera can be five or six times that file size, and the memory card, now a fraction of the physical size, can hold thousands of photos.
Now, I live in Baltimore, where I’ve been since 2016, walking distance to Oriole Park at Camden Yards, giving me an opportunity to attend many ballgames. The year before, In 2015, I bought a DSLR camera with a kit zoom lens, in part for work, but also with the idea in the back of my mind to take photos at ballgames.
With the powers of a WiFi-enabled memory card and a smartphone, I’d post photos I took during the games from the convenience of my seat on Instagram. Since we all know posts with hashtags clearly get more attention on social media, I started adding “a beautiful day for #baseball” to my posts — usually my first post of the day from a game — as a way to incorporate the real trendy “#baseball” hashtag.
I quickly realized I took a ton of photos — usually hundreds per game — so I wanted to find a way to create a space to collect the (few) good photos I’ve taken over the years and share them, while also not bombarding my friends’ Instagram feeds. This website, ABeautifulDayForBaseball.com, is the result of that. I upload the photos to Flickr and use a WordPress plugin to import the albums into what I hope is a nice looking website.
This is just a personal pet project of mine. Perhaps in another life, I’d be a baseball photographer. Right now I’m a writer at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground. You can see my online portfolio at JonBleiweis.com.
Will you see every photo from every game I go to? Of course not. Sometimes I’ll be in an upper deck seat with a nice view of home plate and a cable crossing through the batter’s box. No one wants to see photos of that.
Hopefully you enjoy looking at my photos as much as I enjoy taking them.