My busy week continued with a trip over to the Apex Ice Arena in Arvada to shoot the game between the visiting Battle Mountain High School hockey team and the Ralston Valley  Mustangs.  I am still trying to get the best light coverage at this rink.  My access is pretty good, and I have some ideas to change my lighting a little bit.  I tried something new for this game, but I did not like how it ended up, so I am going to tweak it some.

I am finding myself shooting a lot of Ralston Valley sports lately.  I shot tennis, volleyball and football in the fall, and now I am shooting both boys and girls basketball & Hockey.  In fact, I just had a request to photograph the Mustangs next wrestling match, and I would love to shoot it, but I will be in Boulder shooting the Stanford Cardinal as they come to play the Colorado Buffaloes in a Pac-12 basketball match up.

I am really wanting to become a SID photographer at a local college, or a team photographer for a local pro team, but I would also not turn down the chance to be a booster photographer, or official photographer for a school, especially like Ralston Valley.  I am so impressed with the school, the people at the school and the coaches, parents, and players so far.  It is a nice school, relatively close to my home, and it just seems to fit.  So, maybe soon I will get that call.

Battle Mountain did not look that great from the start.  Ralston Valley was coming into this game 6 and 1 overall and undefeated in league play.  Their only loss was to Standley Lake.  Battle Mountain came into the game with a 2-3-1 record.  But just watching them warm up, they did not look like they were going to be able to match up with the talent that Ralston Valley has shown all season.

And I was right, Battle Mountain was not as good as Ralston Valley, but they did have something up their sleeves that was something that Ralston Valley did not appear to expect, and had a tough time dealing with at times.  Battle Mountain came to battle, and they hit hard.  More than once a RV player was skating over to the bench with the wind knocked out of them, or a minor injury.

In fact, Battle Mountain was playing hard enough, they were able to hold Ralston Valley to just one goal in the first period.  Not bad.  Typically, Ralston Valley sees a team that is not up to their level and a scoring onslaught begins, but while Battle Mountain was finding it hard to get the puck down to the goal, they were not going to make it easy for Ralston Valley to score.

It was more of the same in the second period, with Ralston Valley only able to add one goal taking a 2-0 lead.  Lots of penalties were coming to both sides.  Mainly rough play caused Battle Mountains penalties, but it looked like frustration was the cause of Ralston Valley’s penalties.

In the final frame, Ralston Valley was able to tack on two more goals and still held Battle Mountain scoreless.  It looked like in the third period Battle Mountain was starting to run out of gas.  They just could not keep up with the Mustangs all game long.

For this game I used all 4 of my lights, but the way I set them up did not really help with rink coverage, but I believe I have a way of fixing that for the next game.  I bounced all 4 lights, but I think for the next game I will point one down ice at the opposing goal to light that half of the rink. Then point one at the ceiling over mid ice, and the other two have pointed above the blue line and goalie.  That should give me full rink coverage with just 4 light.

Using this set up I will try to do a couple different things.  I will more than likely shoot with 3 cameras instead of one or two.  One, my Canon 1D Mk II I will use with my 120-300 2.8 or my 70-200 2.8.  Then on my 7D I will have either my 70-200 (if I use my 120-300 on my 1D) or my 24-70.  Then I just may have to break out my classic 1D to use as a remote camera on the corner of the rink with my 17-40 on it.

I have tried 3 times to do a remote camera at this rink and I always forget something.  A battery, mount, or trigger cable.  But I have it all in my strobe case so I can shoot a remote with any of my cameras.

To view and purchase photos from this game, please visit my Maxpreps Gallery for this game.