Testing the f1.8 on the Big Stage, and Going For The Candid Shots Again

This past Saturday night, the Phoenix were at home entertaining the Guildford Flames in the first night of a double-header (the second leg being down in Guildford on Sunday), and it was time to give the f1.8 35mm prime lens another outing. Fellow Phoenix photographer Nick Ogden and I had arranged to be on the ice for the players' entrance before the start of the game, and as such it was time to see what the lens was capable of in the variable low lighting, with the spotlights twirling and the coloured lights flashing. To play it safe and to preserve the fast shutter speed, I went with an ISO of 1600 which allowed me to shoot at 1/400th of a second, and prayed that the auto-focus was fast enough to keep up with the speed at which the players jumped onto the ice. Now all that we needed was for the lighting guy to get his cues right, and hit the players with the spotlight from the front. So, first to step onto the ice was netminder Steve Fone, and as you can see, the spotlight was a little late....



However, the spotlight being late turned out to be of no consequence with this shot, as it gave me a cracking silhouette to shoot. Luckily, the spotlight turned up on time for the rest of the player introductions:




The lens performed very well, even at ISO1600. I can safely say that I'm very pleased with how the shots came out, but this next one is my favourite:



It's not every day that you get to shoot a hockey player as he barrels onto the ice with his tongue pointing out at you!

I've been chatting a lot with Nick and with Rich Murray (the programme producer and pro photographer) about content for the programmes, and all season I've been producing a series of 'profile' articles about Phoenix match night staff. The final profile in my current batch was used up this past week for the Guildford programme, and so with that in mind I've spent the last week getting in touch with more people to profile. The replies that I've had have been excellent, which takes care of the bulk of the text parts of the articles. My main task is to shoot some portraits to go with the articles, and with this in mind I went into Saturday's game with the intention of shooting no fewer than six people's portraits! Here are some of the ones that I got in the bag:





Even though these portraits are semi-posed, they're still in-keeping with my preference for spontaneous portraits and candid moments. Don't get me wrong, I do love the challenge of shooting a 'proper' posed portrait (as demonstrated recently) but the style that I'm most enthusiastic about is the candid, the spontaneous, the captured moments that freeze time and give us a permanent reminder of what would normally pass us by. With that in mind, I was snapping away like crazy at the end of the Phoenix game, and came up with moments such as these:





I know that I don't get paid by the Phoenix, and that I do all of this of my own volition, but I can safely say that this phrase applies to me when I'm at the rink with my camera in my hands: I love my job!