First Experience Shooting Ice Hockey

If you follow me on Twitter, I am sure you would have seen a couple tweets about being at GM Place (home of our Vancouver Canucks) over the past week for the Women’s Canada Cup Hockey event. I am not going to go into a play by play during the whole event, but I will go over some of the aspects of my experience for covering a ice hockey event in regards to photography.

One morning while checking my email, (a daily routine) I came across an email from the Hockey Canada Cup Organizing Committee inviting me to fill out the media accreditation form. I am still not sure who’s list I am on, but I am not complaining. I sent back an email asking more about the requirements of accreditation and they told me to fill it out, send it in. It wouldn’t hurt to apply even if I was not with a major media outlet. A few days before the event started I received back an email welcoming as an accreditation media person. I was excited, yet nervous as this would be  my first time shooting ice hockey.

I headed over to GM Place (Gate 9) and headed up to level 500 (media) to sign in. I received my media pass (which will go along with my LG Snowboard FIS World Cup and Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival passes) and was shown around the arena. Being able to walk around GM Place including the underbelly is pretty cool.

As this was my first time photographing ice hockey it was going to be interesting. At least I got to play around with my camera and its settings to figure out the best combination. Don’t forget, as with other posts here on my blog, you can click on the images below and view a larger version of them without leaving the site!

I watched Team Sweden and Team Canada during their practices on Monday morning. The photos I took during that day were alright, but nothing too exciting. I took my experience from that day and went home, uploaded, reviewed the photos and definitely needed some more tips. I headed over to the Photography on the Net (POTN) forum for some advice from veteran photographers and they gave me some great advice.

Some of the advice I received was: fix the white balance, try shooting at Tv (shutter priority), try shooting at Av (aperture priority). I took all of that and played around with them when I went back to watch Team Canada vs Team Finland. There was about 1,600 people there that night.

I was still having issues with white balance, as my Canon XSi does not allow me to dial in a specific value. Using Av (aperture priority) I was able to utilize my maximum aperture of 2.8 to get nice crisp images as well as help freeze the action at some parts. Using such a large aperture value though leaves for a smaller depth of field. I have also been using AI Servo along with setting the focus point to be the very center.

The next game I went to was the Team Canada vs Team USA. A much larger crowd was drawn out (roughly 6,100 people) and the action was much more fun to walk and photograph.

I finally figured out how to do a proper white balance with my Canon XSi if I don’t believe the preset values will work. Did you know it helps to read the manuals once in a while? What I had to do was take a photo of the ice (preferablly when it wasn’t freshly cleaned) and then set the Customer White Balance to that particular photo. The white balance worked great after that. I also played around with Tv (shutter priority) and keeping my shutter speed at least 1/500. This gave me a wider range of aperture values (f2.8 to about f5.0) which would help on giving a greater depth of field. Granted these games so far I have been using ISO800. I find that my Canon XSi at ISO1600 can produce some pretty nasty grain or noise in my photos.

I went back on Saturday night to check out the Team Canada vs Team Sweden action. The crowd was signficantly smaller, reported at 2,100 people though the comments around me said that must have been the amount of scalper tickets purchased.

The problem I was having here was that the reflection from the glass (plexi) was interfering with my shots. I was keeping my lens up against the glass as best as I could but due to the people behind me wearing white, their sleeves were showing up. In IIHF rules, we were not allowed to use the shooting holes like you can in the NHL, so we all had to make due with what we had.

Sunday was the Brozen and Gold medal games. I attended the Gold medal game with my Dad, so it was Team Canada vs Team USA. Here the pro photographer were in attendance and me and another freelancer got shuffled to another section of the ice at one point. I guess when you’re shooting with 3 Nikon D700 cameras with remotes set up around the rink you get more priority of where you shoot. Anyway, the crowd was much larger at roughly 8,100 people so the energy was buzzing nicely around GM Place.

I also found that the lighting seemed brighter to me this game over the lighting during the previous day of Team Canada vs Team Sweden. That game I had to shoot at ISO1600, but at this game, the Gold medal game I could shoot at ISO800 and still get the shutter speeds I wanted.

Team USA did win 2 – 1 and both teams did well at entertaining the crowd. Did you know that in women’s hockey there is no body checking?

Overall, my week of shooting ice hockey at GM Place was a great experience and I loved every moment of it. I learned some new things with my camera, such as how to set a Customer White Balance, and how to set up back focusing to the * button as well. I find that now I have * set to focus, it allows me an easier time to set up my shot and then take the photo without having to worry about loosing focus.

You can check out my other upload photos of the Women’s Canada Cup Hockey 2009 at GM Place over on Flickr.

On the geek side of things if you’re interested I took roughly 1771 photos over the course of the week of just the hockey alone. At the average of 14MB per RAW file, that works out to be about 25GB worth of photos. Not bad considering one of my cards I use is a 16GB SDHC. Crazy eh?