Bears 6, Crunch 1

It depends on what I’m shooting. :-)

Nice lens, but I can’t hand-hold a lens that huge, nor could I walk boldfaced into the Verizon Center carrying it, since it’s a professional lens and obviously looks like one (though with the press pass I carry in Hershey, I could there)… My elbows would sue for separate maintenance! ;-)

For hockey, what I do is I shoot the ice a few times before warm-ups to get my white balance set right, and usually when I’m actively shooting, I let the camera make most of the decisions, because hockey just plain moves too fast for me to be doing that, and framing my shots, and paying attention to exposure…

The one decision I make for the camera is that I will typically set the aperture (somewhere around f/11 on this camera), rather than the shutter speed or both, because I’ve run into problems where if the aperture is too wide, and I focus on center mass of the player, I lose his face. (Of course, that was on the Sony, which was not designed for sports. I have not had that problem with the Canon – yet.)

The Canon does do a lot of ISO graininess clean-up, which helps; the shots I posted this morning were all shot at ISO 2000 or thereabouts, and I couldn’t do that with the Sony – they’d be grainy as hell.

Without image stabilization, most people can’t typically hand-hold a lens for a length of time any longer than about half the focal length of the lens. For example, shooting at 300mm, you wouldn’t want a shutter speed any slower than 1/150 of a second. Approximately. With image stabilization, I have hand-held for much longer, but a long shutter speed isn’t desirable for stop-motion photography anyway.

With all digital photography, expose for the highlights, NOT the shadows. You can always bring out shadow detail in the digital darkroom; you can’t put it back in when it isn’t there. A digital image is equivalent to a slide in that regard, rather than a negative; it’s a positive image.

I tend to frame just a little looser than I normally would, and crop in the digital darkroom, because I’d rather do that than lose part of the image to tight cropping. I also tend to shoot upwards of 500 images during warmups alone, and worry about culling them later. Looser framing allows me to focus on the center mass of the player, unless I’m shooting a tight closeup of his face (like the ones of Varlamov above). I very seldom have time to review pictures during the game, and since I carry a pretty big memory card (16 GB compact flash in the Canon), I have not needed to cull images – remove the really truly bad ones – during the course of a game. Generally, I’d carry at least 8 GB for an indoor sporting event if I plan to shoot a lot – and I do shoot a LOT.

Drop me an e-mail at irockthered {at} gmail {dot} com if you want to yakk about this more! :-)