Right EF lens for indoor sports

[Kenialanuza]

Hello! I’m an amateur and new to digital photography.
I have an EOS Rebel T7 with a lens 75-300mm without stabilizer. I’ve been taking ice hockey pictures with this camera for 2 years now but I’m very frustrated because the images are very blurry and dark. When I see them in the camera they don’t look as bad as when I pass them to the computer or my iPhone. I’m thinking on updating the lens but I’m not sure which one would be the ideal to help me get decent images. Please, recommendations for the lens and the right software for editing. Thank you in advance! 

[wq9nsc · Accepted solution]

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

[Kenialanuza]

Thank you SO MUCH! 🙂

Kenia

[Tronhard]

Given that ice hockey is a very fast sport and not going to be as well lit as an outside one, and that a hockey rink is smaller than, say, a football pitch, (and in the absence of a specific budget) I would suggest going for one of the EF 70-200 f/2.8 lenses.  Yes, it's got less magnification effect than the (frankly pretty awful and slow) EF 75-300, but one can crop an image from with a chunk of quality glass, but you can't make it sharp.  The autofocus on these L series lenses is incredibly fast. You will get 1 stop of light, far  better optics, and if you do have an IS version, that can be set for panning action on one of the switches, so you can have the help with that as well.

Failing that, the EF 70-300 IS USM MkII f/4-5.6 has extremely fast focus and great IS, and the optics are sharp. I would suggest that to compensate for the stop or so, that you up your ISO to 1000 or 1200 and, if necessary, use the PP denoising software to clean up the images.  I note that noise is more often generated from the image being under-exposed than a higher ISO, so bear that in mind when considering the ISO setting - you could run ISO in auto mode with a max value of 1200 and the camera will only increase up to that point as required, otherwise choosing lower values, depending on your other settings.

As to post production software. Adobe offer a Photography suite that includes Lightroom and Photoshop, and if you really want to clean up your images, you can go for something like deVinci Photo AI, that will really reduce the noise and help you sharpen your image.  I think it will also help you to upscale the images, (great if you did a big crop) but I'm not 100% sure of that one.

[Kenialanuza]

Thank you for your reply and recommendations Trevor. 
I definitely have a lot to learn in photography and of course put in into practice. 
The quotes you cited at the end boosted my hope of getting better. Thank you! 
Cheers, 

Kenia