My soon to be brother in law plays hockey recreationally with a bunch of friends. He asked me if I felt like taking some pics on a Saturday afternoon, seeing that they were playing another team and renting a skating rink for the game. I agreed, thinking it might be fun to try something different, and I’m definitely glad I did. But, WOW, is hockey a challenging subject to shoot! It’s definitely nothing like shooting basketball, skiing or skateboarding outdoors with plenty of available light.
The lighting in these indoor rinks is dim, so you’re going to want to use your fastest glass and up your iso. I had to shoot through the glass, because shooting from the upper stands meant shooting through a net (to guard spectators from getaway hockey pucks).
I got a couple handfuls of shots from the box/bench area where there is no glass, but I didn’t want to keep getting in the way of the players. Thankfully I didn’t get nailed by any stray pucks 
I was monopodding it, with the Canon 70-200 f4 L lens trying to not go any higher than ISO 400 or 800. Seeing that I was shooting with a 20D, I can’t really push it much further without the quality suffering. My goal was also to nail a couple of panning style shots, which was still pretty challenging. Later in the day, I switched to my nifty fifty and shot f1.8 ISO 200 handheld, with some decent results. If you’re going to shoot hockey games like this without strobes, I can see needing really fast primes, and preferably with some reach. 50 mm isn’t going to really cut it.
Overall, I shot probably 500-600 frames, culled and deleted at least 200 right off the bat due to technical problems, or just because I was bursting so much (like you have to do with sports photography) and only have about 20 or so “keepers” that I like. Half the time I didn’t realize I didn’t have my autofocus set to servo, not that the 20D has too great of a servo mode, anyway. What a mess. That’s a big fail, for me – but you can’t win them all I guess I sure did catch a lot of “abstract blurs” – haha.
