1. Don't shoot through he Plexiglas. You spent all that money on a good lens
and the Plexiglas renders it useless. The open areas near the benches or by
the penalty box are the best vantage points but you may need special
permission to shoot from there. If you do shoot from there learn to work
with both eyes open because you will need to watch what is coming from both
sides all the time. The older kids elbows and sticks extend over the edge of
the boards, even if your head is there.
2. Do not use a flash. If you catch a player looking right into the flash
you may blind them and cause an accident. Pissed-off hockey parents are not
a pretty sight and they may beat the crap out of you. Even worse, they might
damage your camera.
3. There are filters to compensate for fluorescent lights but they do absorb
some light. The older the kids the faster they move and the more you need to
shoot at high shutter speeds. Using black and white film makes the color
shift problem go away but the processing cost (or time) can be prohibitive.
The lights are always high so expect to have shadowing problems.
4. Once you get past the "cute kid" type of pictures, good hockey action
pictures are hard to get as you must anticipate the action and fire the
shutter before things happen. That burns a lot of film. Many of the hard
checks and exciting action will look very passive in pictures unless you hit
things just right. The best pictures are when you can see the shooter, the
goalie, and the puck in the image. That is not easy. Some rinks have a high
vantage point you can shoot from but the pictures taken from a low vantage
point are much more dramatic. In close with a wider lens is more exciting
than far away with a long lens. (Exciting from both the image standpoint and
the potential injury to the photographer.)
5. If you want to be good at photographing hockey (or any other sport) start
photographing the kids when they are small and build your skills as they get
older and faster. Look at the work of professional photographers in
magazines like Sports Illustrated and try to imagine how they got those
pictures. The more you know the kids and the sport, the better you will be
able to anticipate the action peaks. It's fun but also hard work.
/jmac
-----Original Message-----
From: olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx [mailto:olympus-owner@xxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of Martin Walters
Sent: Monday, March 14, 2005 1:34 PM
To: Olympus mailing list
Subject: [OM] Ice hockey photography
I’d like to see what wisdom there is out there for successful colour
photography in hockey arenas.
My wife’s nephew and god son is old enough (6 years) to play
“competitive” hockey! Everyone in the family knows that I have been
acquiring photo equipment, which to them looks awfully like
“professional” stuff. They now expect “professional” photos - whatever
that may mean.
Last weekend I took along my OM-1 (the OM-2 needs new light seals),
Tamron 180, reasonably powerful flash, new monopod and Kodak 400ASA film
to try the lot out. This was uncharted territory, and luckily the little
tikes only used one-half of the rink. I got the photos back and they
were not bad (and not as bad as I had feared).
What are the issues?
- With flash, I spent the whole time at 1/60, so it’s a good job the
little ones don’t skate fast.
- In small municipal arenas, you are stuck behind the “glass”, or at
least part of the glass, and there are no "look down" shots.
- A reasonably powerful flash (good to approx 70 ft in telephoto setup)
doesn’t do much at all (I suspect the "glass" cuts down on light
transmission).
- As long as the skaters were pretty much still the photos were quite
sharp (as expected given the shutter speed).
- the ice was not “white” - had a grey/green “mottled” tinge, indicating
artificial light, though the other colours (uniforms, adverts etc) were
pretty reasonable.
For next time, I think I will leave the flash at home (apparently at
professional games they are banned anyway) and run with 800 ASA (Fuji is
easily available) and a faster shutter speed. I wonder if I should be
directly behind the "glass", rather that a couple of rows up in the
seats. Using daylight film, I presume that I will have to adjust colour
balance (which I can do in Photoshop Elements) to get white things white.
So, any help/advice would be welcome.
Martin
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