I have shot enough youth sports to know the basic for spors. I have a 70-200 2.8. I have tried to shoot hockey several times now. I gotten some pretty good shots, but I am not entirely happy with the color I am getting. I have tried to do custom white balance, but I am still not happy. I know that I could shot in RAW & do it in preprocessing, but i'm not giving in to that just yet.
I will post some pics later, but in the mean time if I try to set in °K which direction do I go if it is too yellow our blue?
Let's say I have it set @ 4000°K & it is too yellow, do go up or down? How big of steps should I go?
And often different areas of the same rink are different from each other. You will have shots where part of the ice is correct and part is pink, in the same shot! You will also have odd sequence shots with wacky colors in them of the same area due to the cycling lights.
I do as Geoff suggested, use a preset off of the ice before it is flooded. I verify that on the LCD and sometimes I have to redo that too. I find that that works better than anything else, but it still is not 100%. At least it is consistent in that you wont have the camera deciding what to use on a shot by shot basis.
epalanb,
this is what i learned from another photog...
before the zamboni runs, set your gear to custom wb, ss to approx'ly 1/15 sec and shoot a panning shot of the
roughest part of ice you can find. then set the custom wb using the wb from that panned image. has worked well for me.
show off some of your images!
B
Agree, I'm usually within 3300 range, also can white balance off the skates in Lightroom if any of the players have skates with gray on them. I do have the expo disc but the auto WB on newer Canons has been very good, requiring minor adjustments.
Not meant to hijack this and I may be clueless or ignorant about this.
Whenever I take picture of my son's hockey game, I never worry about the white balance setting on my camera. This is because I always processed the photos after the game for crop, leveling, contrast, noise reduction, etc. During this, I usually adjust the WB too and that way, it is consistent throughout and it does not take much time at all to do this.
Can someone please help explain why you want to set the custom WB when you can fix this quickly and easily in the post processing?
Fixing WB in PP can be difficult when shooting jpeg. If you shoot RAW its not too much of a worry......
Getting it right in camera is the best. I shoot either depending on the importance of what I'm doing.
I always shot RAW for hockey but now hardly bother. But I still did a custom WB.
Now most of the rinks around me are OK at ISO 3200 to 6400. f2.8 to 4. CWB and + 1.3 of EV min. Jpeg works fine and sometimes a little highlight tweak and contrast and job done.
I turn off noise compensation now as I don't need it.
Here is an example of everything set in camera, no noise reductions and no post processing...Using the typical settings mentioned above.....I think its pretty good?
When I take photos of my son's games, I always shoot raw and adjust the WB, contrast, etc in the post. What I need to improve significantly is how to be able to take photos like yours - i.e. well exposed and with no noise (even at iso 3200)
However I find the addition of Exposure to the images and the other settings I use in a way cancel out a lot of the noise.
There is noise in this pic of mine but the brightness makes you ignore it I guess.
Practice, practice and more practice. I'm at 20,000 images plus of hockey and a camera change to get to where I'm at. Most of the time I'm still not happy but others really like them. So I guess I wont be buying any of my own shots?
I usually set it just the way Geoff describes above... off the ice before the zamboni gets out. I'll shoot the sample shot in a fairly plain white area of ice where there's no lines or ads painted on, and completely OOF. I also use a longer shutter if it's under heavier cycling lights. Sometimes it takes a few attempts before I get it fairly close.
I sometimes fart around with an expodisc as well.
Oh, and here's a trick for seeing how close you are. Set the custom WB or Kelvin scale to taste, then take a shot of a plain white part of the ice or boards at your game settings (ISO and shutter etc) and check your RGB playback. If you've got it fairly close, you'll see where the highlights peak (generally the ice highlights) you should see your R, G and B channels lining up fairly closely. If the red's a lot higher than the blue, you know you're too warm, and vice versa. Just a tip that serves me well.
Even still, if the lights cycle heavily, it's hard to avoid some image-to-image variation, and even pink and blue offsets in the SAME image. That's why I shoot almost predominantly RAW and re-sample off the ice, the white parts of the boards, or a true grey, black or white piece of equipment if all else fails.
Here's an image where it had some nasty pink and blue shifting on opposite sides of the shot, but tweaking it in post brought it back to respectability IMO.
Of course, nothing like shooting under really perfectly consistent lighting that doesn't cycle like at the new Compton Ice Center at Notre Dame where you can shoot JPG and not tweak the WB at ALL in post...
This may or may not be applicable, but when shooting Softball I encountered a huge variation under sodium vapor lights. Guy Rhodes wrote a really useful post on this over at SportsShooter:
Basically since the lights are 60hz cycles, if you shoot any faster than 1/60th you will get WB variation shot-to-shot, but you will also either have to boost ISO to ridiculous levels and/or get motion blur. While it doesn't offer any particular solutions, it is an informative post to work from with that in mind.
