This was a pretty unique hockey tournament if I say so myself. The Michigan Pond Hockey Classic was a bracketed tournament of continuous matches on fifteen or so "rinks". I put rinks in quotation marks because they shoveled large amounts of snow off the ice (on Whitmore Lake) to create the rinks - the snow piles became the boundaries of the rinks. I was there to photograph one game during the tournament (January 15th) and it was a really nice experience to shoot a hockey game that was outside and not be behind glass - sure the occasional thought of a puck flying into my lens crossed my mind, but it's more important to get the shot! To view more if the photos, click here.
The biggest challenge when shooting hockey is to compose a great shot that encompasses the stick and the player at the same time - especially if there are multiple players in the same shot. The obvious thing would be to pull back and get a wider shot, but the action doesn't happen far away - you need to be close to feel more of the action.
The other issue is focus and depth of field - since the focal points are always moving in multiple directions, make sure your camera is on continuous focus. I prefer to manually select my focal point, so I set my camera to focus on a single point. I choose to do this because as the players move around the rink, I can choose to isolate one player or moment and stay with that, rather than having the camera try and choose the focal point it thinks is my main subject. The issue with selecting that point manually is the time it takes to "tap, tap, tap" to your new focus point - I missed some great shots while tapping for sure. But that's the name of the game in sports photography, you just have to do what works best for you and keep shooting to try and be the most prepared you can be when the moment happens.
Depth of field also poses a challenge in situations like this - with so much background distraction you really want to isolate the players and blur the background. When you have a razor-thin depth of field (because of shooting at f/3.5 zoomed in to 300mm), a player being three feet away from another player will appear out of focus - but what if both players need to be in focus at that moment to really capture the moment properly? Unless you have lightning-quick fingers, you're probably going to miss the shot, which is exactly what I did. I captured a great moment of one player diving to block the shot of another player - but blew the shot because the aperture was too large (one player in focus, the other was out of focus). Like I said, these things happen though when you're trying to do so much at a fast pace. My advice is still to go with an idea and shoot it wholeheartedly - you might miss some, but you can't capture every moment perfectly when the elements are changing so rapidly.
Speaking of rapid changes, the sun was ducking in and out of the clouds (but mostly hidden in the clouds). Of course, when the sun is behind some thick cloud cover, you're inevitably going to lose some (or most) of the contrast in your colors. To counter some of the washed out colors, I converted a fair amount of the photos to black and white or sepia and upped the contrast substantially to make up for the lack of color. I just take a gray day as an opportunity to play around with post processing a bit more because the only way you're going to get any contrast (and color) back is to use a flash and I didn't have the opportunity to use it in this situation.
Until next time...
T.J. Wolsos / Head Photographer
www.darkroomvisuas.com
