topic Re: best settings for shooting ice hockey on EOS R50 in EOS DSLR & Mirrorless Cameras

best settings for shooting ice hockey on EOS R50

Wytipp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:27:34 GMT

I’m a team manger and recently got a canon r50 i haven’t touched thr setting i need held with the best camera settings for hockey photography

Re: best settings for shooting hockey on eos r50

stevet1 — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 05:03:08 GMT

Wytipp,

If you do a Google search for "photographing hockey", you will get plenty of hits and tips.

Basically, it comes down to keeping your shutter speed up, if you want to freeze the action (at least 1/500), your aperture open as wide as you can, and000 upping your ISO to around 1600 or 3200.

When the players are still like sitting on the bench,, you can back off your shutter speed.

You might try Tv Mode, and Auto ISO, where you can quickly change your shutter speed from moment to moment.

Keep your focus area as small as you can (single point or a small zone, so that your camera doesn't settle on something you don't want. Keep your camera in Servo Mode, and learn how to back button focus.

Steve Thomas

Re: best settings for shooting hockey on eos r50

wq9nsc — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:19:14 GMT

I always shoot sports in manual mode, lens wide open, shutter speed 1/800 minimum and preferably 1/1,000, ISO set to auto. For hockey, you will want to set metering to partial metering mode so that the background illumination from the ice doesn't cause underexposure of the athletes. Shoot in RAW so that you have good control over exposure correction in post.

If you need to do some group shots, then you will probably have to narrow the aperture (higher f value) to increase depth of field but you may need to drop shutter speed for these shots to avoid pushing ISO too high because of the reduced aperture/reduced light reaching the sensor so depending upon arena lighting these may have to be primarily non-action shots.

A shot that takes a little skill to master but can produce nice images in hockey is the panning shot where you shoot with a reduced shutter speed and pan the camera so that the player is in sharp focus but even the immediate background is blurred. It takes some practice but a hint to get you started is to set to single point focus and choose a point on the uniform as your focus point because this gives you a good reference to sync your camera motion exactly to the player motion. Set camera to burst mode, begin panning and once you are visually locked on and in sync, take a burst and a few of them should come out nicely. This works well when a player is breaking away and heading rapidly down the rink. With this technique, you can produce athlete images that pop from the background even when you don't have a wide aperture lens to produce good background blur with a nice Bokeh. Attached photo was shot with an EF 400 f2.8 lens wide open and it is great at making a player pop from the background but with a narrower maximum aperture lens that doesn't provide such a shallow depth of field, you can get the same sort of image with a moving player using shutter speed and motion to blur the undesired elements.

Rodger

1DX III, EF 400 f2.8 @ f2.8, 1/,1000, ISO 16,000

Re: best settings for shooting hockey on eos r50

Danny — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:14:29 GMT

Just to clarify, are you trying to photograph ice hockey or field hockey?

Re: best settings for shooting hockey on eos r50

wq9nsc — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:20:44 GMT

GREAT question Danny!

Rodger

Re: best settings for shooting hockey on eos r50

Wytipp — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 14:26:19 GMT

ice hockey

Re: best settings for shooting ice hockey on EOS R50

FloridaDrafter — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 19:27:23 GMT

@Wytipp wrote:

I’m a team manger and recently got a canon r50 i haven’t touched the setting i need help with the best camera settings for hockey photography.

What lens(es) will you be using?

Newton

Re: best settings for shooting ice hockey on EOS R50

Wytipp — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 02:55:14 GMT

i have a 18-45 right now i just tried to shoot a soccer game it didn’t turn out well but i will be getting a 55-210

Re: best settings for shooting ice hockey on EOS R50

Tintype_18 — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 17:57:22 GMT

Good luck this season. I like digital as one can experiment to find the correct settings. I have been known to shoot a dozen or more photos to mentally (a challenge at my age) note the settings for baseball, fishing, landscape, etc.