Preseason Jr. A hockey

Some shots from a preseason action between the Missoula Maulers and the Tri-City Titans. Comments and criticism appreciated. A mix of iso 1600 and 3200. All taken with a 40D - 70-200 2.8 and hand held through the glass.
1.

Exposures look good and shots capture the action well.

Noise seems a little heavy, but I'm wondering if it's less camera noise and more of a "speckle effect" that some kinds of glass can cause. One of the rinks here is a real bugger for that - great lighting but cheap glass (can never win...sigh...). At any rate, a little NR in post should make it less obtrusive.

I agree about the noise, any recommendations for NR software or techniques?

Nice shots! As I was looking at these I recognized one of the kids on the bench - Justin Kim. He has a crazy good wrist shot. I remember a few years back, I am pretty sure he was a u16, he was allowed to play on my aldult team during a preseason game; he was very impressive and made our team look good. He is a nice kid and hard worker to boot. He used to work at the facitlity that my son skates out of.

Here's one of yours I ran thru Noiseware Community (it's a free download). Hope you don't mind.

Other than the noise, you have a great eye for the game!

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michael88 wrote in post #6458417
Nice shots! As I was looking at these I recognized one of the kids on the bench - Justin Kim. He has a crazy good wrist shot. I remember a few years back, I am pretty sure he was a u16, he was allowed to play on my aldult team during a preseason game; he was very impressive and made our team look good. He is a nice kid and hard worker to boot. He used to work at the facitlity that my son skates out of.

Yes, that is Justin Kim. He came to play with this team towards the end of last season on a trade from Tri-City. He came back this year and so far has played fantastic.

Alan Dye wrote in post #6458460
Here's one of yours I ran thru Noiseware Community (it's a free download). Hope you don't mind.

Other than the noise, you have a great eye for the game!

Don't mind at all, I will have to look into that software. Thanks!

Noiseware Community is free. They also have a "pro" version. I use Noise Ninja, and there may be a couple of others (check noise reduction threads in the Raw, Post-processing and Printing Forum).

You also have noise reduction options in DPP and, if you use Photoshop, Adobe Camera Raw. There are also some NR techniques within Photoshop, such as converting to LAB mode and blurring the colour channels, amongst others. Again, search the POTN forums, or the internet in general, for tips and techniques.

John:

I do not mind the noise in these and in fact I like the "noisy" version of #4 better than the Noiseware version that Alan posted. I find that often too much NR will result in loss of detail and make the image have a soft water color or pastel painting type feel. I note this in the players face in particular in the example (at least on my monitor).

I will often avoid Noiseware but instead use the NR features in Adobe Lightroom, which I feel provides good and more subtle NR. I suppose this is the same type of NR as in Camera Raw since that is the engine it uses.

As to the photos they are all nice captures. I would crop #1,2,3,and 5 all a bit tighter though simply to isolate the players more and eliminate some of the extra white ice/boards around them.

Cheers!

Chris