Digital Camera Technique for Sports Photography

I think we can all appreciate Age's Hockey and Motorsports photographic work. Perhaps he and others will share their wisdom on the dos and don’ts for shooting hockey.

Age mentioned in another thread that he shoots with a Nikon D100. I was curious what else he could tell us about his rig. For instance, do you use Prime of Telephoto lenses? Are any particular filters effective on typical arena lighting (Lynah being atypical)

Chris

The long zoom is the Nikkor 80-400 f/4.5-5.6D ED VR AF, and the wide angle zoom is the Nikkor 17-35 f/2.8D ED-IF AF-S, each of which cost more than the camera body, but I'm a firm believer in good glass. Because the CCD is 2/3 the size of 35mm film, you can multiply those numbers by 1.5 to get the effective length of those lenses.

I've got a UV filter on the long zoom and a polarizing filter on the wide angle zoom, but with the lighting in Lynah, they're pretty much there to protect the lens. I've got to do so much work on the images to get the color decent, I don't think filters will do much, unless you can find a magic green/red self-adjusting multizonal filter to deal with those damn lights...

The 80-400 is a little dark (4.5-5.6), but the vibration reduction is quite nice and really does work. Of course it's not going to slow down your subject. With hockey, it comes down to speed, so I shoot wide open at simulated 1600 ISO and deal with the noise in Photoshop. I'd sometimes like the lens to be shorter for hockey and longer for racing, and always want it to be brighter, but in the end, it's a good and very versatile lens.

The 17-35 is just wonderful. Of limited use for hockey, other than wide rink atmosphere shots, but great when you need it.

The D100 is ok. Since I need to do so much work afterwards, I wouldn't think of shooting anything but RAW images. Consequently, the image buffer drops to 3 images, which gets in the way at times. Even though the resolution's a bit smaller, the D2H's enormous image buffer and 8fps shooting would be ideal, if you can afford one. I have a 512MB and a 256MB card, both rated around 40x, and usually dump images to my digital wallet during intermissions.

Well, that's about all I can think of. If you have any other questions, ask away.

Was just reading Rob Galbraith's review of the Nikon D2H. One very pertinent section:
[q]The flicker-detection capability, however, has not yielded better frame-to-frame consistency in either a local hockey arena or basketball gymnasium. These are venues that have given us fits in the past because of the colour shift brought about by their pulsating lights. Even when going so far as to hold the camera above my head, with its Ambience Light Sensor positioned under one of the flickering lights, the shift from frame to frame was about as evident as when the D2H was set to Preset WB under the same conditions.

Perhaps this isn't how Nikon envisioned the flicker-fixer function of the D2H's Auto WB would be used, but it is how we hoped it would help fight the colour battle. We've got our fingers crossed that other locations will yield better results.[/q]
Source: [www.robgalbraith.com]

For what it's worth, it's nice to know Nikon's trying to deal with the problem, but I think it's a losing battle. If all the lights flickered in unison, maybe you could do something about it, but with adjacent lights being completely out-of-phase with each other, it's pretty hopeless. I still want a D2H though...