Cornell - UMass Lowell game photos

Photos from the first game of the 2007 Florida Hockey Classic, Cornell's 3-2 loss to UMass Lowell, are online at [www.billhoward.phanfare.com].

While Cornell lost, there were some individual moments to savor, such as when UML's Mike Potacco (above) lay in wait for Cornell's Colin Greening and wound up being the one who got flattened.

(Plug for the photo and video sharing site, www.phanfare.com - while it's about fifty bucks a year, the site has unlimited storage for photos and videos, and great slideshows, not the tiny slideshows on a Shutterfly type site. Actually, there is one limit - you can't upload more than 10GB of photos per month.)

The pictures look great, Bill. Thanks!

ebilmes
The pictures look great, Bill. Thanks!

Ditto, many thanks.

Excellent photos. Thanks.

ebilmes
The pictures look great, Bill.

Except for the fact that Lowell's uniforms are ugly, but that's hardly Bill's fault.

Josh '99

ebilmes
The pictures look great, Bill.

Except for the fact that Lowell's uniforms are ugly, but that's hardly Bill's fault.

Cornell's loss, however, is my fault. Woof. I noted we only went in odd years to the tournament, starting 2003, and Cornell always responded with a championship. Apparently the woofing gods have a long reach.

Photos kind of remind me of the old Rochester Americans uniforms. Anybody old enough to remember some washed-up, soon-to-be-has-been on the team, Don Cherry?

Digital photography is so much better than the old film kind, even if it's putting my hometown out of business. Sad to see Kodak fumbled the future perhaps even worse than Xerox.

Of course, while I'm not old enough to have watched Cherry play for the Amerks, I have followed the team for my entire life (and my dad for the better part of 45 years). Our jerseys aren't nearly as horrid as Lowell's are. I almost took that as an insult, Bill.

Here's Grapes in an old picture with home jersey colors. He is back middle.



Plus, our current ones are much nicer...

billhoward

Josh '99

ebilmes
The pictures look great, Bill.

Except for the fact that Lowell's uniforms are ugly, but that's hardly Bill's fault.

Digital photography is so much better than the old film kind, even if it's putting my hometown out of business. Sad to see Kodak fumbled the future perhaps even worse than Xerox.

Bill,

Were you using a DSLR or a point and shoot?

marty
Were you using a DSLR or a point and shoot?

For the Florida Classic, I used a digital SLR, a Canon 30D with a 70-200mm f/2.8 (also a 10-22mm ultra wideangle for the photos shooting in the corners through the cutout in the glass). Nikon vs. Canon vs. Olympus doesn't matter. A digital SLR focuses faster than a point-and-shoot and when you press the button, it takes the picture right now, not a quarter-second later. A higher end DSLR does a better job than a cheap one and a really high end one (like David McKee's dad carried) is awesome, but you're talking $500 (Rebel XTi, Nikon D40/D50/D80), $1,200 (30D/40D, Nikon D200), and $4000-plus (EOS 1D, Nikon D3), respectively. For sports especially indoors you need a wide aperture telephoto lens (f/2.8 not f/4 or f/5.6) because of the poor available light; ditto for outdoor night games. The lens is where you should spend the money because the pictures come out so well in so many situations and if you shoot at a very wide aperture (f/2.8, f/4) the background for outdoor scenes drops out of focus. There are three stats to remember about a 70-200mm lens: f/2.8 across the zoom range, $1,500, and 3 pounds. See The Ultimate DSLR Lens. I think you're better off with a $500 camera and $1,500 lens than $1,500 camera and $500 lens.

Also on buying DSLRs:
- Get a DSLR that automatically cleans the sensor each time you turn it on. Incredibly useful.
- Megapixels do matter. A 12 megapixel camera gives better results than a 6 megapixel camera because when you're too far away with too short of a lens (eg 200mm from the blue line halfway up Germain Arena is still a bit short for the opposite goal), when you blow up the middle quarter of the image, the 12 megapixel camera leaves you with a 3 megapixel image and the 6 megapixel camera leaves you with about 1.5 megapixels, not much better than a good cellphone camera (although the lens quality is vastly better). That said, between 5 vs. 6 megapixels or 10 vs. 12 megapixels is not significant.
- Image stabilizer lenses (IS in Canonspeak, VR (vibration reduction) for Nikon) improve pictures in low light. The Sony Alpha cameras with built-in stabilization work, too, although competitors say Sony has to average out the in-camera stabilizer routine for all lenses and it's not as exact as one for each individual lens. I can shoot a kids' indoor school concert at 1/30 second at 200mm, f/2.8, and 2 of every 3 photos are essentially blur-free.
- Non-OEM lenses (Tamron, Sigma) have excellent glass quality now for a lot less money but they don't (yet) have as many wide aperture (f/2.8) zooms. And there are some interesting lenses such as a 28-200mm lens you could use for most everything except indoor work.
- Carry a point and shoot compact pocket camera anyway to capture pictures on occasions when you aren't carrying your DSLR and multiple lenses.
- [edit add] If you're thinking of buying Nikon DSLR because you have Nikon film SLR lenses, or Canon because you have Canon, don't. The film lenses especially ones 10 years old, are too heavy and bulky. Swallow hard and go all-new.

Bill, if I am stuck with a f/5.6 (because I'm cheap), what do you recommend for settings? The only success I've had is in shutter priority mode, but I need to go ISO 1600 to get acceptable illumination... but of course that affects graininess. Is there something I'm missing, other than an f/2.8 lens?

Kyle

Kyle, at ISO 1600, in a lot of rinks you can go 1/250 or 1/200 at f/5.6. Rinks have about twice the light of a generation ago; the dark circles under the eyes of the unbeaten Ken Dryden-led team of 1970 are not from lack of sleep. Still, even today with an f/5.6 lens you may be 1-2 f/stops underexposed. 1 stop underexposed (not enough light) is correctable and 2 is sort of correctable.

Me, I shoot aperture priority wide open (f/2.8 or f/3.5 preferably at ISO 1000 and see what's the max shutter speed I can get for the available lighting), knowing I'll always have at least 1/250 second, which slows but not stops most action and I try to pan with the play which if it's done right gets the players sharp and the background a bit motion-blurry. I usually set the camera to overexpose by 2/3 of an f/stop (typically 2 clicks on the over/underexpose dial). Here's why: The camera thinks everything is a neutral gray on average. When it sees the white ice, it doesn't think "dimly lit white," it thinks "very well lit gray," and so it reduces exposure by the better part of an f/stop.

In your case, since you know you're borderline on having enough light, you're doing it right setting a shutter speed (shutter priority) since you'll probably wind up at f/5.6 regardless. If you were to set aperture priority at f/5.6, you might wind up with some photos at 1/125 at Lynah (I can't recall how much light the renewed rink has). If your camera has a histogram feature (the graph of how much of the picture is dark (left side of the area graph), mid-tone (middle part), and nearly white (right side), check that at the rink (usually by pressing the photo review button then the Info button a couple times). You'll probably see the graph stops before it gets all the way to the right, which means you're probably underexposed.

In Florida with good lighting but not say NHL rink lighting I was shooting at 1/800 at f/2.8 at ISO 1000. With an f/5.6 lens that would have been 1/200 at ISO 1000 or about 1/320 at ISO 1600. That's with 2/3 stop of overexposure compensation. So if Lynah has half the light (meaning 1 f/stop less) then a more or less proper exposure would be 1/160 or 1/200 at f/5.6 at ISO 1600 and if you forced yourself to underexpose by 1 f/stop and then corrected in Photoshop Elements (at $99 it's almost all you'll ever need) you'd have pretty good images. Usually just telling PSE to do auto-contrast will fix most of the problems. If you automate, auto-contrast first and then, if needed, auto color correction to take some of the red out of the ice. I trust auto-contrast but less so auto color correction.

Also try Picasa, a free download. It's great for quick edits when you have hundreds of photos. Adobe Lightroom is better but at $300.

If you want to come away with a dozen really nice photos of the game, try panning at 1/125 on Cornell's charges up ice (or charges down ice trying to catch the Clarkson breakaway skater. Sorry, Mike). 1 in 3 will be passable and 1 in 10 will be really superb. But that won't work if you want a record of every good play.

Age or someone else with lots of Lynah photo experience can chime in with the correct lighting for the rink and whether it has hotspots where the light is brighter than in other places.

Bill, very nice pictures. I particularly like the one of Schafer walking off the ice. The idea of a pan at a slow shutter speed is not something that you see in hockey too often. That one is great. I agree with you that on-ice slow shutterspeed pans are not for the faint of heart. Most pictures will be crap, but the occasional one will be fantastic. Most photojournalists won't risk it...they need to get something usable every time out.

Don't know the last time you've been back to Lynah. Unlike when we were undergrads there's now LOTS of light. If I recall correctly we used to shoot f2.8 at 1/250 pushing Tri-X B/W film to ISO 3200 or more! (Very grainy results, but that's all we had!!) Today, Lynah's much brighter - f3.5 at 1/500-1/800 at ISO 1600. I don't shoot much hockey anymore (I'd rather cheer), but once in a while I'll bring a camera and shoot for fun!!

It was great seeing you in Estero. Take care.

Larry '72

There is better lighting at Lynah but as Age made us aware a couple years ago, there is a weird phase phenom that makes the lights cycle through a color tint which your eyes don't pick up.


Digital cameras do pick up this tint. Age is an ace at correcting this and it is one of the reasons that his photos don't show up right after the game. He has to massage the digital image to come up with the great shots that he shares.

A digital gray card may help improve color balance. You stick the card in the corner of the photo and crop it out (not very useful tip for sports photography) or take a reference photo and then when you have Photoshop do a white/gray/black balance, you click not on a neutral gray object in the photo, but on the neutral gray card in the reference photo. If your camera has a manual or preset button (for color temperature), you can use that while photographing the test photo. Otherways, to do this you've got to shoot raw images (native format, no compression, not standard JPG), that take up lots of space, eg 10MB not 3MB for a 10 megapixel photo.

You have to get the card out on the playing surface, not just shoot it in the stands. Also, this presumes the rink color temperature doesn’t shift from area to the area of the rink, or it doesn’t change over time. Some say it’s not a shift every couple minutes but rather a shift many times a second in response to flickeriing caused by the 60 Hz power supply and affects high speed photos, say 1/500 second, but not slower speed, eg 1/30 or 1/60. (More costly lighting uses high frequency ballasts that may resolve the problem, but Cornell is probably not going to spend the money just to keep the Journal and Sun happy.)

I use the Robin Meyers Imaging digital gray card, about $15. (Several others make them, too. I like RMI because you can clean it off with a sponge if it gets dirty w/o affecting color balance.)

I'm impressed by what Age does to get Lynah photos color corrected and it's paintstaking work. Then it comes down to the question of which do people want more: pretty good photos the morning after the game, or really excellent photos later in the week.

Larry72
The idea of a pan at a slow shutter speed is not something that you see in hockey too often.

I had a bunch of them from the last game at Lynah I posted =P

Yes you did. Must be getting old!!! You had a couple of nice ones as well.

Larry '72

Bill, I shall try what you say. I get the feeling that with different gear and different rinks, experimentation is the only way to gain the experience necessary to know what's needed without having to do 20 test shots every time you go to a game.

Kyle