Hockey Game Shots
 

Hey all - going to a hockey game tonight, ECHL (Vic Salmon Kings) and gonna try to take some action pics.

Anyone have any tips? I know arena lighting can be kinda crazy, lots of yellows and what not.

I'm thinking of going with shutter priority mode and shooting at maybe 1/500th... I will experiment with a couple different shutter speeds, but I don't think 1/250th will be fast enough. Presumably the aperature and ISO will set themselves to a reasonable level if I'm on shutter priority, yes? I could also go full manual, set full aperature (f5 at 200mm) and ISO 200? Are these appropriate settings for the arena environment?

I'll be using a D5000 w/ a Nikkor 55-200mm lens. Is a lens hood necessary? Will I be able to take some shots through the glass, or should I try to shoot over it and down towards the action?

Thanks in advance.

f5 @ 200 ISO is most certainly not fast enough. You'll just have to experiment to see the best exposure for your gear. I'd say you'll have to shoot at 1600 ISO, as your lenses are slow.

To get decent shots you need at least F2.8, so i'm sure with the speed of your lens you'd have to bump up the ISO real good, so 1600 ISO and up if possible! Good luck! No lens hood either :)

WB - use user-preset WB. set it off the ice before the Zamboni comes in, do it at a longer shutter speed to get all the cycling light colors factored in.

Shoot in Manual mode, set your shutter speed at 1/320s to start with and adjust from there. Open up the lens to as wide as possible, crank up that ISO to 1600 or 3200, and set your AF to AF-C.

Good luck and have fun!

Hey guys, thanks for all the advice! I was only able to read Senna4ever's post before I left for the game, but it was very helpful and I bumped the ISO up. I actually took most of my shots at 1/250s which allowed me to use ISO 800.

Bonjour, I did use Manual mode thankfully... Full aperature like you suggested. Next time I will use your white balance trick - what exactly is the purpose of this? To balance out the weird lighting in arenas?

I'll post some shots when I am done uploading (took 250 shots ish in about 10 minutes). Hopefully there's a couple useable ones, although I suspect most are either a bit noisy or a bit blurry. Here's hoping!

What went well: All the shots had decent light & exposure.

What went poorly: Shutter speed was, overall, too slow. Too much blur. Also, the glass I was shooting through was quite marked up, which ruined a few otherwise acceptable photos.

My thoughts: Needed to up the ISO a bit more and shoot at a faster speed.

Some of the OK ones:

http://www.borlandstudios.com/pics/hockey1-small.jpg

http://www.borlandstudios.com/pics/hockey2-small.jpg

http://www.borlandstudios.com/pics/hockey3-small.jpg

http://www.borlandstudios.com/pics/hockey4-small.jpg


Part of the problem was that 95% of the photos weren't very interesting, and most of the 5% that were good had either motion blur, poor focus, or spots/marks on the glass ruining the photo.

Looks like you did a good job from what i can see! Nicely done, keep it up!

Welcome to the world of sports photography! :p

Thanks! :thumbsup:

pretty good start there! You should try to expose for the players, so that the ice is almost at the point of being overexposed. That'll give you really clear faces and bright background (ice) to make the players jump out of the screen.

do you have access to ice-level areas with no glass? That should clear up your shots quite a bit since there won't be anything for you to shoot through.

and yeah, for ECHL level players I'd use at least 1/400s to freeze motion.

Interesting, good idea. I think the first picture (the faceoff) kinda has that type of exposure, but not the other three.

Ice level yes, that's no problem, but there's glass all the way around. There are no photography holes like there are in GM place. I usually just tried to shoot through a clear spot in the glass. Another option is to climb up high enough in the stands and shoot at 200mm, but then I'll need to shoot at a higher ISO due to the lower max aperature, and I'll be shooting downward which could ruin the pics.

Thanks, I'll go back to another game soon and shoot at higher speeds. I didn't want to up the ISO above 800 for noise reasons, but since these photos are not for print I think it's probably a good idea to shoot a bit higher. I think most of my shots here are around 400-600.

Last time I was using full manual mode, including ISO, but I think next time I'll let the camera do auto-ISO and I'll shoot in Program or Shutter priority mode.