How to take a dramatic hockey portrait

It’s not every day you get to play with flashes at a hockey rink. So, here’s how to make the most of it.

Hockey is fantastic, but taking great photos of hockey can be a nightmare. Combine poor or strange lighting situations with the blistering speed of the game and you have the ingredients for demanding photography.

Most shots require a high ISO, resulting in face-melting quality loss. (If you disagree with the severity of this statement, trying shooting at ISO 3200 on a Canon Rebel T1i then get back to me)

But for this shot, we got the chance to slow things down a bit.

Full disclosure, this is a self-portrait. Well, sort of.

That means that I’m the goalie in the picture and I set the shot up, but it was a very reliable friend who pulled the trigger.

This was also fairly late in the evening, so we didn’t have time to get things completely perfect, but I’m still satisfied with the results.

Here’s what we’re going to talk about in this article:

• Building the Shot
• Post Processing
  
• Things that could have been better

Building the Shot

The first challenge to deal with was reflections. Hockey arenas are lined with plexiglass, which instantly limited options for lighting placement. Sure, a front-on lighting setup could work with some time devoted to Photoshopping out the reflection. But why create work when there are other, better options?

A typical athlete portrait lighting setup has two lights coming in from either side of the subject. More lights can be used to create a rim-light and throw some controlled light back into the subject’s face, if that’s the desired look. This style emphasizes textures and shadow, showing things like jersey folds really clearly.

I went with unmodified flashes for this shot, rather than using any modifiers to soften the light. This helped add some grit or edge to the shot, which I planned to boost as well in post.

We played a bit the positioning of the lights, checking the results each time to make sure that there wasn’t too much in shadow.

Before

Here’s the shot, right out of the camera:

f/8, 50mm, ISO 100, 1/250

Read more in the Hockey Photography Series:

Post Processing

First up was some exposure control. RAW is wonderfully flexible for editing. Using adjustment brushes in Lightroom, I could simply “paint” the areas I wanted to be lighter.

Clarity is a setting in Lightroom that boosts local contrast. It makes pictures look gritty. I hit this picture with Clarity very hard. The goal was to bring out texture and give the picture an edge. I wanted to look as mean as possible, considering I’m a fairly small person playing the only position in hockey where you aren’t encouraged to hit people.

A tighter crop knocks out some of the annoying details and negative space on the sides. Then spot removal cleans up some bothersome details and nudging up vibrance helps bring the colour out more. I tried to have the red goal posts and the teal colour of the jersey stand out as much as possible from the background.

So here’s our “After” shot…

Things that could have been better

Fresh ice would have been nice. This picture came after an hour and a half long practice, so the ice kind of looks like crap. Getting fresh ice (and a killer reflection off the surface) would have been nice but was a luxury that simply wasn’t available.

The straps coming off the pads look a bit messy. I’m not a professional goalie (yet) so I don’t have top of the line equipment. If I was photographing Carey Price I definitely would have fixed that up during the shoot.

The shadows off the net and on the ice to the left also kind of bother me. Hard shadows are a result of using hard, unmodified light sources. Some more attention to placement might have made those shadows a bit more subtle.

But for a shot that took maybe 15 minutes to set up and take, I’d say I’m quite pleased.

If you have any questions, simply let me know in the comments!