Last night I attended a Spitfires game with a friend of mine from the US side, at his suggestion. It had been about a decade since I last went to a game, and I figured it was a good chance to go shoot the old area before the Spits move out the the deep east side.
Built in 1924 as the Border Cities Arena, this building hosted the inagural season of the Detroit Red Wings (then called the Cougars), in 1926-27 as the Olympia wasn’t ready in time for the season.
Pre-game warm-ups
An interior view of “The Barn”.
# 18 Mickey Renaud
Windsor’s Adam Henrique (#14), battles Kingston’s Cory Emmerton
Kingston’s Ben Shutron looks on as a disputed goal is argued.
Craig Voakes races to the puck ahead of Kingston’s Michael Kolarz.
In the end it was all for naught as the Kingston Frontenacs leave Windsor with an 8-5 win.
Those are really good shots. Hockey is notoriously difficult to photograph.
Thanks, hockeyplr.
There were way more rejects than keepers that night.
An old-timer I correspond with in e-mail told me in his day they would use a wide angle lens focused to infinity and shoot away, then crop into the action in the darkroom. Seems reasonable. I shot hockey a few times in the poorly lit Ice Park and like Andrew, deleted many more than I kept. Instead of trying to focus on the fly, I just focused on an area of the ice and waited for something worth photographing to happen there. Same for shooting figure skating. But the poor lighting meant having to use slower shutter speeds when the action called for faster ones. And wider apertures which made focusing that much more critical. My hat’s off to sports photographers everywhere!
John> that’s how I shoot with the manual focus lenses.. if I try to focus on action, I’d never get a shot. I focus on something where action will eventually happen.. then wait and wait.. 🙂
Good pics andrew.. makes me want to go to a game soon! I used to always go to the games when I was younger and people I worked for had season tickets..
John & Mike, if you guys want to give it a try one night, let me know. I’ll go again and try round two shooting…
Sure, sounds fun….don’t forget your 2 Gig memory card eh!! 😉
I’ll be out of commission for the next week or so, but after that I’d like to do that.