Hockey - Not For Sissies

Bryce Wilson

I thought these were an interesting series from tonight's regional playoff game.

Not too sure mom's going to be wild about them.:D

1.




2.




3.




4.

ian408

I've seen worse

I like the progression. Good photos but the white balance isn't consistent. I think the first looks the best with regard to that.

Bryce Wilson

ian408 wrote: »

I've seen worse

I like the progression. Good photos but the white balance isn't consistent. I think the first looks the best with regard to that.

Thanks for the comment.

Consistent white balance is indeed a struggle for me with hockey. With these, I manually set WB in camera to match the florescent lighting and then tweaked it a bit with the "eyedropper" in Lightroom and applied the WB from the tweaked image to all via sync.

Number 3 (helmet) would have issues as the other three were taken above the glass and three was shot through the glass which has a tint.

Is there a better way to go about this without doing a custom WB on every individual image?

lifeinfocus

Would a tool like ExposDisc work if you used in once, or would you have to use it often depending on where the subject is on the ice?

Bryce Wilson

lifeinfocus wrote: »

Would a tool like ExposDisc work if you used in once, or would you have to use it often depending on where the subject is on the ice?

The ExposDisc is a nice tool, but there are ways to set WB in the same manner without using one. Maybe not as quickly.

I could be wrong, but I think the biggest problem is the color temperature change during the power cycle of florescent lighting along with the lighting not being completely consistent through-out the playing surface.

This is a image I tweaked individually. See if this is closer to correct. Thanks.

john l

Great stuff Bryce. It's a challenge to shoot hockey. The lighting is always inconsistent and in many arenas you have dark areas as well as bright. The lights cycle and if you are shooting throughout the glass it for the most part is always tinted. j

lifeinfocus

I used ExpoDisc for this shot and a series of hockey photos. I was not using a FAST lens, so I had to use ISO 6400 to get reasonable shutter speed. And shooting from above through a screen.

But I think the white balance turned out well. Post processing to increase vibrance, saturation and clarity only.

Not a great sports shot, but for discussion purposes.

jhefti

If you're getting significant differences in WB from shot to shot, then you most likely have a light cycling problem. Unfortunately the only work-around for this is to use strobes or to tweak each individual shot. And even with tweaking, there are limits to how well you can correct the WB.

And there are issues with the color beyond the WB when shooting under these conditions. Most of these indoor lights have poor color rendering indices, meaning that the intensity as a function of wavelength is highly variable. The result is that some colors appear richer than others. To make matters worse, the color rendering index (CRI) is usually a function of where the light is in its 60 Hz cycle. So beyond just adjusting the temperature and tint, I find I have to adjust the individual color channels for saturation and hue as well. It's an enormous amount of work unless the lighting is stable and you can apply WB and color channel correction to all the shots; never possible with cycling lights.

I always shoot RAW under these conditions and adjust by eye in the post. I've never found an ExpoDisk to be very helpful. YMMV. I also find that the ambient light during editing will affect how your eye sees the WB. An edit may look fine as you do it, but it may be off when viewed later with different ambient light.

I think the last two shots have much better WB than the first set.

JimKarczewski

John, you forgot to mention if you want to rid yourself of light cycling you should shoot at 1/60th. :P KIDDING

With lights that cycle there isn't much you can do but process each frame or strobe the rink.