Shooting sports

I went to shoot my first sports-shoot last night. It was an ice hockey match between the local team AAB and Rødovre. It was the quarter finals of the national championships, and the atmosphere was great.

I just love that Ice Arena. It is everything you could possibly ask for: good location, good facilities, amazing sound system, a monster jumbotron and great view (almost). When I say almost, it’s because I had booked a shitty seat near the glass barrier. My thoughts were that in case they had a net all the way around the rink, at least I could shoot through the glass. The glass looked like it was covered in a layer of lard, but luckily there was no net at the sides of the rink. So I moved and got a seat further up with a great unobstructed view. Nice!

Lighting

Before I went, I was told that the lighting would suck at the ice arena, but the 1D Mark IV behaved like a champ. It went really well. Although the lighting was a bit dark, it worked quite well. The light meter said ISO from around 800 to 3200. I fixed the ISO limits on the camera at those and set it to auto ISO in shutter priority mode. All I had to do was rotate the dial from about 1/150 for static photos and 1/1000 of a second for action. I tried experimenting with 1/500, but the puck was too fast for that. Finally, the EF 100-400mm lens

Speed

Now, regarding the speed of the game, it was substantially faster than soccer, but not nearly as fast, or erratic moving, as a small bird in flight. All those hours aiming, tracking and shooting birds in flight bore fruit last night. Tracking a 200 pound human being, no matter how fast, is dead easy, compared to what I am used to. I shot over 600 pictures and NOT ONE was out of focus. You just got to love that 1D Mark IV.

White balance

The white balance of the lighting was kind of off, but because I decided to shoot RAW last night, it was quite easy to correct it in post, when I came home. My decision to shoot RAW paid off.

Other stuff

The perfect lens for this kind of work would probably be the EF 70-200mm f/2.8 IS L.

Thank you

I would like to thank Mr. Martin Struzinski, Assistant Coach for AAB Ishockey for allowing me to shoot this match.