2 ACCEPTED SOLUTIONS
Thank you for following up so quickly with the "shooting" information because a lot of people don't.
Those parameters seem reasonable and that is not a bad image. A big part of the difficulty of shooting hockey is you generally have to shoot through the protective screen and it kills contrast. A good way to combat this is to capture images in RAW instead of JPG which gives you far more ability to make adjustments in post over a JPG file.
Canon's DPP software does a good job of editing and conversion of JPG to RAW files. It is simple to use and free to Canon camera owners so download it if you haven't already. You can adjust brightness, contrast, relative levels of shadow and highlight, color temp (aka white balance), etc. in post after you capture in RAW. Just doing that will help a LOT and I think you will be amazed at what you can do with a bit of contrast adjustment and adjusting the overall gain along with shadow and highlight level.
The four images below are when my daughter was playing in an indoor 3V3 soccer tournament and the combination of the semi-translucent gym building giving the lighting a really odd "ambience" and rapidly dropping air temperature created a very hazy set of captures but they cleaned up nicely in DPP primarily with color temp adjustment and a bit of added contrast, prior to some editing they were pretty bad. All were captured with a 1DX III and EF 200 f2 lens.
Before investing in another lens, try shooting a game in RAW and see how things look post-edit. And then given your seating location close to the ice, I think the 70-200 f2.8 would do a great job for you.
Rodger
Thank you Rodger. I completely forgot to mention the settings on my first post. I usually just select the sports mode and go with the default settings.
For the picture below, I was considerably close to the action, so I didn’t zoom in as much. The ISO is 2500, 1/800, 4.0.
Thank you so much for your help.
Thank you for following up so quickly with the "shooting" information because a lot of people don't.
Those parameters seem reasonable and that is not a bad image. A big part of the difficulty of shooting hockey is you generally have to shoot through the protective screen and it kills contrast. A good way to combat this is to capture images in RAW instead of JPG which gives you far more ability to make adjustments in post over a JPG file.
Canon's DPP software does a good job of editing and conversion of JPG to RAW files. It is simple to use and free to Canon camera owners so download it if you haven't already. You can adjust brightness, contrast, relative levels of shadow and highlight, color temp (aka white balance), etc. in post after you capture in RAW. Just doing that will help a LOT and I think you will be amazed at what you can do with a bit of contrast adjustment and adjusting the overall gain along with shadow and highlight level.
The four images below are when my daughter was playing in an indoor 3V3 soccer tournament and the combination of the semi-translucent gym building giving the lighting a really odd "ambience" and rapidly dropping air temperature created a very hazy set of captures but they cleaned up nicely in DPP primarily with color temp adjustment and a bit of added contrast, prior to some editing they were pretty bad. All were captured with a 1DX III and EF 200 f2 lens.
Before investing in another lens, try shooting a game in RAW and see how things look post-edit. And then given your seating location close to the ice, I think the 70-200 f2.8 would do a great job for you.
Rodger
A great summary Ernie 🙂
And Anna texted me last night that she made the club soccer team at the University of Portland so maybe I will get a chance to photograph her on the soccer pitch again sometime. She originally intended to go out for the university team when she started her undergrad but realized that her academic path on the way to a doctorate combined with her continuing internship with Los Alamos National lab and ongoing research for the Department of Energy wouldn't allow time to be a D1 student athlete.
So my days of quick trips to the west coast with no checked luggage may disappear because I don't think a 400 f2.8 or 200-400 f4 extender is going to fit well in the carry-on category. I will be fine with that!
And on edit, Anna's soccer skills and my sports photography skills have both come a long way from when I was coaching her youth soccer team while simultaneously doing photographer with my Canon 1D Mark II. But her intensity has always been there!
Rodger
