Little League Ice Hockey - need some advice

I don't have any experience shooting Ice Hockey (or other sports for that matter) in an indoor rink.

Can anyone offer some shooting tips? What mode, AV, TV or M is best?

If mode is M or TV, what's a good shutter speed to start with? These are Pee Wee hockey players. They're not that quick ?

What about color temperature? Indoor Ice Rinks have awful lighting. Should I shoot a custom white balance?

Lens recommendation? I was thinking 70-200mm f/f2.8 with a 1.4x tele extender. I'll be shooting from a few rows up in bleachers, but hoping to get closer, ice level through the glass, if permitted.

I don't think I'll be permitted to use flash, so that's off the table.

Any other tips?

Much appreciated.

Ugh, no advice, so I winged it.

http://www.ivanbodenph​otography.com …098992&k=X3HQds​k&lb=1&s=A

I'm no pro but I can tell you what works for me. My son is novice (7-8 year old) so with these guys you can get away with 1/340 of a second but no slower. 1/500 and faster is recommended for anyone older. In order to achieve these shutter speeds I usually need 2.8 or faster. I owned the 70-200 IS version one but size and weight was a killer, and was not totally impressed so went to primes. I recently bought a 135L and only used it once so far but its everything they say it is. I shoot with 85 1.8, 135L 2.0 and the 200 2.8. Focus mode is set to ai servo using all focus points and high speed shooting. I usually decide which lens to use depending where I'm shooting from. I own 5D2 and bunch of crop cameras but usually shoot with the crops to extend my reach. Iso 1600 is not a huge problem with crop cameras as long as I shoot A mode wide open, capture RAW files and then clean it up in Photoshop. I use dfine plugin to clean up noise. The most important thing is to OVEREXPOSE by 2/3 and sometimes 1 whole stop. This ensures that you camera properly exposes the player and does not get fooled by the white ice. If your not properly exposed the noise gets ugly. Set your custom white balance to the ice although it shouldn't matter cause I shoot raw and you can correct it easily by selecting the white color picker in curves and click on the brightest spot on the ice and should fix it. Checking your histogram is very important to see where your exposure stands. Its a great reference for exposure in hockey. Here is my public album I post for our team. You should be able to see the settings I used. My keeper rate seems to be higher when I shoot vertically, I don't know exactly why the cameras seem to focus better and faster vertically but they do.
https://plus.google.co​m …095506094492/al​bums?hl=en

i'm no pro at hockey photos either but i shot for a roller hockey league for a couple years (WAY worse lighting then ice hockey!) so i shot in manual mode (as i always do for everything) and basically every rink i went to the lighting was drastically different! so my setting were never really the same! i basically set them up so i could shoot with as fast shutter speed as i possibly could while still keeping the photos from not being too dark so i wouldn't have to do much editing afterwards! and switched up the angles of the shoots too.. never stayed in the same spot, went from center ice, to corner of the rink, to behind the goalie, to the players bench etc. it helped from keeping myself getting bored as well!

i used my 35-350L zoom lens

looking at your pictures you took from the game, looks like you are off to a good start!

so basically... practice practice practise! just like what your coach tells your kid for playing hockey. haha

just the other week i was going though ALL my photos on my computer, and deleting and organizing, and i saw a big improvement when i was going through the first season i shot to the second season!

you can check some of my hockey photos here: http://www.hazephotogr​aphy.com/f907900650

hope that helped a little!

Thanks everyone for all your great advise! I appreciate it. I hope to get to another game soon and try what you both suggest.