My toughest sport photography experience to date.
My primary camera took a tumble. Out of commission. My back-up camera & I had to fight off issues with the florescent/LED lighting of the USA Rink – rolling redouts.
My cameras have an “anti-flicker” setting that helps to alleviate this issue, but some newer lights OR irregular power sources for the lights sometimes make the feature not work.
The workarounds are:
1. Lower the shutter speed to a rate that doesn’t capture the alternating light frequencies….but will blur the action!
OR
2. Increase the shutter speed to capture more moments IN BETWEEN the alternating light cycles, but lower image quality.
I hate blurry sports shots.
So I went with option 2.
This whole scenario killed my photo-shooting mood. Over the course of 6 games, I only took about 1200 shots. With sports, typically about 50% of those would be really good photos. About 50% of those would be given to the client for a keeper rate of about 25%…which in photography is a fair rate. I ended up with 87 final images. A 7.25% keeper rate.
Also, I didn’t get shots of the other teams that I wanted to get for SRI….
However, this wasn’t a paid gig AND the other professional photographers that were there had the same issue, so that mutual misery comforted me!
Regardless, I will share the images for friends and parents to copy and save for their kids. My apologies on the varying quality, next time I hope we get to play in the 1980 or 1932 rink where the lighting was excellent!
If any parents want a full-sized image and/or one to fit a certain print format, message or email me.
Enjoy!
