[Banded Drake]

Here are a few shots from Saturdays hockey game . I am still looking for the right lens to use there , but so far it looks like the 70-200 is the winner . ( i used that lens Tuesday ) .

These were shot with a 200mm Canon L , a 580 ex speedlight . All on manual and above the glass , they want use shooting from 3 different areas and when we are at ground level we arent allowed flash , and it makes it very hard to shoot ..

Any C/C is welcome as i know i have lots to learn ..


1


2


3


What is a hockey match without a fight or 2 LOL . These were shot with my 50mm 1.8 , no flash . I really made the wrong choice with lenses and learned that i need to shoot different . but all is well . LOL .

4

5

just another 2 that i wanted to throw in .

6

7


Thanks for looking , and please tell me what yall think , i value what all of you have to say ..

...... Shawn

[matthew]

You've done really well with this. The exposure is nicely controlled, white bright ice but nothing blown out. I'm wondering if the contrast could be bumped up a little bit, or even just have the blacks darkened slightly.

How much impact does the speedlight have at the distances you were shooting at?

[Wedding Shooter]

Hi Shawn,

Thanks for sharing these pictures. This kind of action in low light is always very difficult to shoot.

I just feel that there is a yellow hue to the skin tones and that the overall colour looks a little flat. What do you think?

[Irma]

These are really great pictures Shawn... Splendid work!
I think #2 is a very classic pose in this sport... I like it... and the last one!! makes me curious if this is the way they play or the picture was taken just a second before he fell down ...

I also think about the color... I wouldn't be shy with the colors here, specially in the uniforms... You have a beautiful white background...

Thanks for sharing your pictures...

[NT73]

The yellow looks pale, as do most of the shots. They are really very good by the way. I mean , as Shawn says, in the low light situation you have to start with a little trial and error. But if it gets better from here ...wow. Well done Shawn.
Going back to the colour It could be a WB problem or just the glare from the ice. The only thing I notice is there are no vivid reds. Maybe there aren't any, only BD knows this, but as an example what colour are the goal posts relative to reality.
Just thoughts, not criticism.
My only suggestion is to go to the practise games, where shots don't matter and experiment, making notes as you go as to what you are doing .(Rather than looking at the exif later.)
Being with (the "Pro's" ) has pushed your learning curve up a long way all of a sudden, but you will make it.

[guerito]

Hehe, the other day we went to a fight and ended up with a game of hockey...

Wonderful shots, Shawn! One can feel the action. About the lenses, I think it might help a lot to have two bodies, one with a zoom and one with a prime lens like your 50mm 1.8. This way you don't have to change lenses in the middle of the game. If you don't have a second body, maybe you can borrow one?

I wouldn't mind about the color, this can be repaired easily and it's not far off anyway. As Matthew said, nothing is blown out. I think you did very well - usually pictures with a lot of white in them tend to be gray. Yours are well exposed (I downloaded one and checked the histogram).

[Toad]

Nice work with very tricky lighting, Drake. #1 and #7 grab me.

[Banded Drake]

Thanks for all the comments ! i dont know where to start LOL .

To be honest i think the yellowing is more a WB issue . I am working on that , i think the next game i will play some with the Wb and see what i can come up with. The other issue is when i shoot through the glass , not being able to use flash the corners are soooo dark ( you can even see it in pic 3 ) . Shooting in AV i think i need to use exposure comp and boost it up maybe a stop or just below ? the hardest thing to me is shooting with flash then not then back to flash . Its real hard to get my timming down LOL .
Thanks again for all the great comments and i look foward to seeing what i can come up with the next game. The other thing that i am going to do is only shoot with the 200mm 2.8 , why you ask LOL . center ice is the brightest and thats where a lot of the break aways happen . So like i said its all about trial and error for me . Although my buddy has helped me soo soo much so if i use what works for him and play a little with that i think ill get some real winners .


..... Shawn

[Toad]

To be honest i think the yellowing is more a WB issue . I am working on that , i think the next game i will play some with the Wb and see what i can come up with.

Are you shooting in RAW, Drake? If you did that, you could play with your WB after the fact, and set it how it looks best during post processing...

[Banded Drake]

I dont shoot sports in RAW , i normally shoot around 500 pictures at a game and i dont think it would be worth it . But i have thought about it just to try and solve the WB issue that i am having .

.. Shawn

[Wedding Shooter]

Shawn - shooting RAW would really help and it is not as painful as you might think.

The light is consistant there so just work out the correct exposure for that center area and set your camera in manual exposure and set to RAW.

Than when you go to the RAW converter simply work out the correct WB on one photo and any exposure adjustment you need and than apply that to all the pictures in one hit. Canon's free DPP software coould do this easily for you. As you shot all the photos on the same exposure under constant lighting you should only need to edit one picture to correct all 500.

Than let it convert to JPEG over night while you sleep.

[Zig]

Agreed for the raw start...doubly so given all the things that are naturally working against the photographer here: the ice's tendency to want to add more light than you need...and the combination of different light sources/types all affecting the light balance.
Adding to Chris's point: on the converter you have a "pipette" so as to place onto a part of the shot that you judge to be the whitest white...this will get you close You can then drag any A(amber), B(blue), etc; so as to fine tune it. Actually, yopu may find even then that there is an unavoidable "cast" given the types of light that might be all fighting away there...sodium, fluorescent, etc; ...all part of the charm and atmosphere too I would have thought!
All in all, I think you've done brilliantly, with an exposure and capture nightmare...I'm glad I'm not drawn to sports snapping, I'd be a rage-aholic in moments; really nice comment on the effect of changing lenses there...I'm full of admiration for those who are ready to get up close and exchange the tele for something more gritty. Nice wotk, lovely to see your stuff again.

[Kombisaurus]

x3 on shooting Raw Shawn! I'm currently sorting through 1500 baseball RAWs as we speak, and if I have to do it then so do you!

These shots are looking really good Shawn. I agree with the comments about the colours being a bit washed out and WB being a bit off, but there is definite improvement in your work every time you post something new and these shots are no exception.

Unlike a few other people however, I think these shots are a touch overexposed. Well, perhaps I'd be trying to put a bit more contrast into the highlights and mid-tones to bring out the texture of the ice and pump a bit of colour into those yellow jerseys. The difficulty is doing this while keeping detail in the blacks and not losing it all into shadows.
I've shot a little bit of Ice Hockey and Figure Skating, and I can certainly appreciate that it's very tough to get consistantly good exposures on the ice. I feel your frustration, and the exposure difficulties give you one more good reason to shoot RAW so you have more control over correcting it on the PC.

Personally I wouldn't bother working on optimising shots for flash. I imagine it would reflect off the glass when you are close to the ice (and be distracting to the players) and I can't imagine it doing much good when you are up in the stands using a longer lens. Even if it does make a difference, I'd imagine it would just blow out the white in the ice and boards before it made any significant difference in reducing shadows. There are times when flash can be great at freezing action, but I suspect this isn't one of them. Mind you, it wouldn't be the first time for me to be wrong about something, so feel free to disagree. :/

You mentioned you were shooting in Av and M modes. Were you using the lenses wide open? What kind of ISO and shutter speeds were you obtaining? When you say you used a 200mm canon L, was it an f/4 or f/2.8?
I ask this because you mentioned you took the last 4 shots with an EF 50mm f/1.8, yet the background seems relatively in focus. Now I know the 50 f/1.8 isn't very useful at f/1.8, but I'd have thought that if you were shooting around f/2.2 then the background would still be more OOF.
It would be a tough lens to use for hockey, although bright and sharp, I found the AF painfully slow and inaccurate in my copy of that lens.

Sorry if I sound critical, but really I'm just trying to find things that might help you for next time. The shots are still great, but I know you're always looking for ways to improve. Sometimes the lighting and venue is such that there really isn't much you can do about it, but sometimes there is.

One thing I've found extremely helpful when shooting sports is when you have the opportunity to go back the next day and shoot in the same conditions again. If you can critique your own shots at the end of day 1 and then work on improving them on day 2, its amazing how much you can improve.

[matthew]

Personally I wouldn't bother working on optimising shots for flash. I imagine it would reflect off the glass when you are close to the ice (and be distracting to the players) and I can't imagine it doing much good when you are up in the stands using a longer lens. Even if it does make a difference, I'd imagine it would just blow out the white in the ice and boards before it made any significant difference in reducing shadows. There are times when flash can be great at freezing action, but I suspect this isn't one of them. Mind you, it wouldn't be the first time for me to be wrong about something, so feel free to disagree. :/

While I also wonder how much use the flash is, I am going to disagree slightly. I think I know what you're saying about the flash blowing out the whites, but I doubt that they'd be reflective enough to create specular highlights, or that there would be enough power to create the flash-monster party photo effect. (Glass might be a real problem, though.) But because you need to double the amount of light to increase by 1EV, I could still imagine it having an effect on the shadows without brightening much else.

I'd worry about distracting the players if there was enough power to really change the look of a shot, though.

I'm also wondering about sync speeds. Hockey's fast, and I can imagine wanting to shoot above 1/250. I wouldn't be able to do that without using FP flash, which kills batteries. I don't know if I can even sync to an FP-mode flash off-camera. (Other people may not have this issue...)

(I'll probably be photographing my future-step-godson's hockey game in a few weeks, so I'm trying to pick up as many technique ideas as I can.)

[Kombisaurus]

Good point about the flash sync speed Matt. Not only does using a flash in high-speed sync mode chew threw batteries, but it also greatly reduces the maximum flash output so you'd get even less reach when sitting up in the stands.

Having said that though, while I certainly try to keep shutter speeds much faster than 1/250th when shooting most sport without flash, when you do use flash, the burst of light is so brief that it will freeze the action for you, so you can often get away with much lower shutter speeds and still end up with sharp photos. The slow shutter speed can exposes for the background while the flash will freeze the action in the foreground. But this only works in some situations. In fact you can get some nice effects with it, combining background motion blur with a sharp subject to maintain detail and still get a good sense of movement.
In a shooting situation like Ice Hockey though, I'd be using reaching for my flash only as a last-ditch move when I simply couldn't get anything usable with the ambient light.

As far as flash distracting the athletes goes, it depends a lot on the sport itself, where you intend to shoot from (ie don't use flash directly behind the goals, especially at eye-level), the level of competition, and the audience.
If you can, ask a coach or official if it's acceptable before the game or look for signs on the wall on the way in. You might even offer to email one of the coaches a few shots of their team, in which case they might notice you've got a professional-looking camera and in turn grant you access on the sidelines or bench.
Otherwise I'd simply advise using your discretion. I try to put myself in the athlete's position and consider if the flash would annoy me, and if it would then don't use it.

Oh, and Matt, shoot RAW! White Balance is always a pain in indoor sports arenas because the big industrial-strength lighting they use gives off weird colour casts. If you do insist on shooting JPG, spend a bit of time before the game setting up a custom WB properly. If you shoot RAW, don't stress about it at the time and fix it up in Post.

[matthew]

I always shoot raw, even when I know I'm going to be shooting hundreds of photos. Four gig cards are too cheap to justify shooting jpegs, and Lightroom makes it easier to sort, rank, and develop raw files than it is to pick a few jpegs through Bridge. (Yes, I know LR can handle jpegs, but why lose the benefits of shooting raw? )

Part of the flash decision dilemma is knowing how much of a difference it really makes. If it's not doing much, then it's not going to add enough light to freeze action, and then the sync speed is a negative with no positives. If the flash is strong enough to make a difference, then it opens up an interesting creative possibility. I'll probably have a flash or two, since I'll also be visiting a one-year-old, but can't see myself using them for a hockey game when I'm just a spectator.

(I'd love to get behind the net with a tripod and a pair of radio-synced Alien Bees (behind/above the glass) during a practice session. Or even to move around on the ice, hand-held, if it can be done safely. Imagine the shots of the players rushing the net on a breakaway, shot from a low angle, sharp focus, plenty of DOF, with strobes overpowering the ambient by a stop or two...)

[Banded Drake]

Well i did respond to all of this yesterday but i guess i didnt submit it .

So here is what i am planning on doing , i am going to try a game in RAW , but here is another thing i am not going to be shooting any flash either . I will be shooting in AV exposure comp depending on what i feel like i need at the time . I really dont know what to expect out of this set up . But one thing i will say its going to be different for me .
I have more shots , and i will say there is a difference in with flash and without . When i use flash i can shoot @ 1/400th and the flash seems to help with motion blur , without flash i shoot in AV so the ss varies so i would have to look up the EXIF info . I think this is going to be fun and i will be sure to post up the results and see what yall think.
Thanks so much for all the input .

To answer some of the questions . We are not allowed to shoot with flash behind the glass because it is very distracting to the players , and prob a little dangerous to the players . And i would think there would be a problem with the flash bouncing also .
Kombi the 200mm that i am using is the 2.8 . The 50mm 1.8 is very tough to use in hockey , and i dont know weather ill use it again or not .

Thanks again for all the input and i have learned a lot ......... Shawn