Shooting the Metros and testing the f-stops

Regular readers will know that I shoot for Manchester Phoenix Ice Hockey Club, and with the new season coming up, I'm looking forward to getting back to the rink and getting some shots done whilst freezing my zoom lens off. So when I got a call from the Phoenix team owner asking if I wouldn't mind going to cover the first Trafford Metros home game of the season to "help them out with some shots", I jumped at the chance. I figured it would be a good chance to test out a prime lens too, so I borrowed a 50mm f1.4 and set off to cover the match. The prime lens was for shooting player profile shots, something which on the day didn't happen, but it did come in handy for shooting closer-up shots from on the team bench during the warm up.




The f1.4 lens was great at shooting in the relatively low light of the rink, allowing me to shoot at ISO200 and not worry about noise on the image. However, I found that shooting at f1.4 gave me too shallow a depth of field when dealing with the close-up shots. It was great for the full body stuff a little further away from the bench, but in terms of the closer shots it was a little too good! So, lesson learned there!

I shot the action of the game using my usual 70-300mm f4.5 lens at ISO1600 (and post-produced the noise down with Noise Ninja). The game itself was a cracker, with Trafford Metros taking on Nottingham Lions and giving Manchester debuts to two of the new Phoenix British signings, Josh Ward and Ciaran Long, both of whom made an impact on the scoreboard and the opposition.




For the shooting of the action, I placed myself on my sometimes-position on the stairs in front of the block where I normally sit. It offers a great vantage point of most of the ice, the exception being the bottom right corner from where I'm standing. Which is, of course, where it all kicked off late in the third period...



The photos have been uploaded to the Official Phoenix Flickr page (rather than my own page), and my shots from the upcoming Phoenix season will also be posted there.

This weekend, I'm pleased to have been able to borrow another lens, this time a 17-55mm f2.8. I'll be hopefully using it this coming week for doing headshots of the Phoenix team (plans are still being sorted) along with one of the other Phoenix photographers, but in the meantime I've been testing the lens out on the nearest willing subject:




Actually, it's not so much a case of Lola being a willing subject, more a case of her being too lazy to wander off away from the camera!

The updated Lola and Lucy gallery can be seen on Flickr.

Thanks for reading!