Making hockey look good
Hockey is a tough sport to photograph. The white ice wreaks havoc with automatic exposure. The sodium-vapor lights cast weird, ever-shifting hues on the players. The fast action demands high shutter speeds. The list goes on, but no matter: the challenge makes it fun.
I decided to take some photos at the Stanford versus UCLA hockey game this afternoon in Redwood City. The light conditions inside the arena were as poor as expected, so I had to adapt.
First, I went to the open Zamboni door before the game and cleaned off the inside and outside of a section of glass. Since I couldn’t shoot over the glass, my cleaning made the glass as clear as possible to shoot through. I also cleaned a second, similar spot on the other end of the rink. Second, I configured my camera for low-light conditions: f/2.8 at ISO1000 to ISO1600. I wanted to freeze the action, so I went with a shutter speed of 1/320 to 1/400 second. The sodium-vapor lights were awful from a white-balance perspective, so I shot in RAW to ease post-processing.
Composition was always a challenge. The game moved very quickly, so it was necessary to predict where the play would go in order to get decent shots. Getting the correct focus, even with autofocus, was another problem. I eventually used a combination of one-shot, auto-point-selection autofocus with immediate manual tweaks.
I ended up taking almost 600 shots during the game. That might sound like a lot, but a good number of those came in high-speed bursts, so the actual number of “composed” shots was much smaller. Of those, I isolated about two dozen for extra consideration. After careful analysis, two of those made the final cut as action photos:
There were some decent non-action photos; I might post them some day.
What would I do differently? Several things:
- Get better access, perhaps a spot to stand at the end of the bench, so that I wouldn’t need to shoot through glass
- Bring strobes; that would help tremendously with the poor light (even at IS01600 and f/2.8, a shutter speed of 1/400 left the shots almost two stops underexposed)
- Do a closer analysis of acknowledged “great” hockey photos to improve my composition and timing
Or you can do what I do: bring your crappy palm-sized Sony to the game, wait until a fight breaks out near the glass, and take photos of that.
Here’s a few tips for shooting arena sports, since it’s part of my part-time job. This probably includes stuff you know or figured out.
– Don’t be afraid to use the highest tolerable ISO your camera has available to you. Getting the shot is way more important than a little bit of noise. On my 10D ISO 3200 is unusably noisy but on your 40D it should be fine, especially in a hockey arena where there’s very little deep shadow (where noise shows up because of low SNR).
– Manual exposure mode. What I do is get there early and take test shots until the histogram of a picture of something containing whatever needs to be the brightest (usually a white uniform, could be ice in this case) ends right below the top of the scale. If the shutter speed ends up being slower than 1/320 to 1/500, depending on the sport, I just default to that 1/320 to 1/500 and shoot RAW so I can push exposure in post like you did here.
– Use * for focus lock if you aren’t already – that is, switch the function of the * (normally exposure lock) and AF-ON buttons, so that AF-ON is right under your thumb. This is Custom Function IV-2, setting 1 on your 40D. This alone probably doubled or tripled my keeper rate when I discovered how to use it on my 10D (although the button setup is a bit different, the idea of using * for focus lock is the same). Now (at least on my 10D), instead of locking exposure AND focus, the shutter button half-press just locks exposure, which is of course irrelevant if you’re using manual exposure. In order to achieve this effect on your 40D you also have to set Custom Function IV-1 to setting 3. This lets you focus only when you need to. This is really powerful in conjunction with AI Servo focus, because you can press and hold * (or AF-ON, if you don’t use CF IV-2) to track a player sprinting towards the goal, and then let go to stop tracking focus, say, when he gets to the goal and you want to keep the focus on the goalkeeper, all while you’re holding down the shutter for a long burst as the play unfolds. (Disclaimer: I don’t have a 40D on hand, so I can’t verify that the custom function settings I’ve described work the same way as it would on my 10D.)
Ah, so *that’s* what that AF-ON button is good for! I upgraded to the 40D from a well-loved 300D, which lacked custom functions (among other things), so I wasn’t aware that the 40D could even do that.
Thanks for the tips!
That picture of you playing chess is great! We’ll totally have to do battle at Kyle’s wedding.
Good news: my third attempt shooting indoor photos in recent days went great! Isaac’s autofocus trick helped a lot. My exposure problems were aided by setting the camera to ISO3200, enabling on-camera noise reduction, pushing the exposure a bit more in ACR, and then running the result through Noiseware. Woo!