I was recruited to photograph a hockey tournament hosted by Arvada Hockey association over Presidents Day Weekend. Originally it was a 20 team tournament that grew to 36 teams and from one ice arena’s to 3 different arenas. I was not able to cover every rink or every game due to the games starting as early as 6am and starting as late as 9:45pm. The tournament had PeeWee’s, Bantam’s, and Major’s levels of teams from local communities like Boulder and Aspen, and teams from as far away as Wyoming, Nebraska, Texas, Utah and California. I had to miss some games because I was working on the Arvada West Wildcat Sparkle story and their last performance was Friday night during the tournament, and I had a previous commitment to shoot the Colorado Buffaloes and Arizona State game on Saturday evening.
Normally for hockey at the Apex Center I like to hang three strobes bellow the seating area on the West rink, and I bounce them off of the ceiling. This gives me good coverage for about half the ice. But, with this tournament, I would be shooting on two different rinks, with games going at the same time. So, early on the first day of the tournament I headed into the Apex center in Arvada to set up my lights. I put two on the West rink, direct fired with my sports reflectors. I used the sports reflectors because the lights were mounted further away from the rink and I was able to get them up pretty high. This gave me real good coverage of half the ice. On the East rink, the seating layout is different, so I set my strobes up with the standard reflectors and bounced them off of the silver covered ceiling.
On the East rink, with the bounced light I had nice light coverage, but had t shoot at ISO 400. On the West rink with the direct fired strobes I was shooting at ISO 200. Because of running back and forth between the two rinks at the Apex, I decided to shoot with just one camera. My 7D and my 70-200mm lens. This seemed to work out the best. One day I shot two games on the West Rink from the stands and I used my Sigma 120-300 2.8 lens which worked out very good from the area.
I had a work area set up on ice level of the West Rink, where I could have my laptop set up to download photos, edit and upload. For the most part, by the time the games were ending, I was already uploading the photos to my website. It worked out very nice, but was a tad cold.
Anyway, here are some photos from the tournament. I was fascinated by many of the goalie masks. Most of them were painted, and many were the typical paint jobs, American flag, flames, but my favorite had to be the Iron Man mask.
Above, a PeeWee goalie dives to cover the puck.
The Iron Man goalie mask worn by a player from Dallas, Texas
Only a handful of girls were playing, but here is one who was playing goalie and making a pad save.
One of the Arvada teams. 3 AHA teams in the finals, 2 won.
This goalie should have kissed this post when the game was over. It saved his team quite a few goals.
A Colorado Rampage goalie gathers up the puck.
A Boulder Bison goalie tries to make a save.
This team was a PeeWee travel team from Nebraska who won the PeeWee B tournament.
You can find all of these photos and 3600 more at my Youth Sports Website
