First Youth Hockey of the Year

Shot some kids hockey this past weekend. Here are a few from yesterday.

Set-up was shooting from the top of a 4-step ladder over the glass between the blue line and the face-off circle (not an optimal position, but there wasn't enough room on the benches, and the penalty box had high glass), with my monopod on the ladder's "paint" platform, with a 1D MkIIN and a Sigma 120-300 f/2.8 with an on-camera flash fired straight up into a Lightsphere diffuser. The Lightsphere isn't really meant for this application, but in this case, it let me bounce flash off the white (OK, white-like) ceiling, and still project some fill flash forward. Flash was set to manual around 1/2 power.

Forget color cycling of the lights - on this arena, one of the main lights in the neutral zone was always pink. Yikes! A WB nightmare, if ever there was one. I chose to expose on the players, which is why the ice/boards look different on each shot. Looked at side by side, you can more easily see the color changes, but when you view a shot by itself, I think it looks best this way.

If I would have had more time, would have thought about strobing the rink to overcome the odd colored light (s).

Dennis

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Two more. The first of these was taken right under the pink light (you can actually see the color reflected in the ice in the first shot).

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

nice shots. 1 & 3 are really good. It's not easy getting faces of juniors, especially if you're shooting from a height. from your position, would you be able to duck a puck without falling?

color balance nightmare, indeed. you did well with the flash. in the leagues I'm involved in, flash is not allowed - the goalies would have an excuse if they missed a save.

DavidEB wrote in post #4043184
nice shots. 1 & 3 are really good. It's not easy getting faces of juniors, especially if you're shooting from a height. from your position, would you be able to duck a puck without falling?

color balance nightmare, indeed. you did well with the flash. in the leagues I'm involved in, flash is not allowed - the goalies would have an excuse if they missed a save.

David,

Thanks. Yep, juniors tend to skate with their heads down (a habit they learn to outgrow quickly once they reach a level where checking is allowed).

I think the flash was pretty unobtrusive since it was being "filtered" through a Lightsphere (see the shot of the rig below - I took the dome off the top of the thing which allowed the light to go straight up to the ceiling unobstructed, and also mounted the flash to a Newton bracket that I was checking out for a fellow POTN'er - thanks Ross - which allowed rapid switching from vertical to horizontal). Having a Quantum Turbo 2x2 helped with flash recycling. The Lightsphere works by letting most of the light go vertically while refracting light horizontally via the "bowl". In retrospect, I maybe should have made a reflector of sorts out of aluminum foil in the inside back of the bowl to increase the forward-firing flash, but it WAS an experiment.

Good question about the puck. I dunno. I'm a former goalie myself, and always wonder how much of my old reflexes I still have . Whenever skaters came close to me, I made sure to pull back from the glass (my lens was about 6" above the top of the glass), and most deflections where I was wouldn't be going too fast at this age group since I was pretty far along towards the blue line.

HOSTED PHOTO
please log in to view hosted photos in full size.

Wow!

Not sure I could get away with that flash set up. The rink I'm in most of the time has a very high pitched ceiling, and it is covered in a silver insulating material.

The player's uniform colors pop! Did you use any noise reduction software?

I'm always trying to improve my hockey pictures. see https://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthre​ad.php?t=385941 for one of my recent posts. I'm going to throw this out there to see if anyone has better methods for fixing red/blue color casts caused by the terrible lighting in most hockey rinks.

Usually what I do, If I have a shot where the red color cast gradually gets worse over the photo, is to use a gradient mask layer, trying to get the gradient mask to match how the color cast changes over the photo. And then use a color balance adjustment layer to remove the color cast. This of course adds quite a bit of time in post for each picture.

Alternatively, if I want to fix it quickly and don't mind a blue color cast (Which I think looks better for ice than pink), I just adjust each color channel in the histogram until each color of the ice peak all lines up. Using the 2nd picture you posted as an example; Below is the historgram for the 2nd picture you posted. If you choose the red channel and pull it down until it lines up with the green channel, and then for the blue channel push it up until it matches with the green channel, you'll trade the red color cast for a slight blue one.

Byte size: ZERO | Content warning: NOT AN IMAGE

Lacks_focus wrote in post #4043859
Wow!

Not sure I could get away with that flash set up. The rink I'm in most of the time has a very high pitched ceiling, and it is covered in a silver insulating material.

The player's uniform colors pop! Did you use any noise reduction software?

Lack - Yep, I used Noise Ninja as my first pass. I also shoot with -1 contrast and +1 saturation in my camera, which helps the colors (especially reds - sometimes TOO much) pop.

Milk - thanks. I could play with these more, but the shots here are only a handful of hundreds taken this weekend, and you know the saying about time and money. Your suggestion is a good one, though.

Dennis