On the first Friday of the New Year non of my regular schools had a home game, boy’s or girl’s, except for Standley Lake.  They were playing a home hockey game.  However, their home ice is at the Ice Arena at the Promenade in Westminster.  I had never been here before, but, I like shooting hockey, and it was the only game for me on this night, so I headed over to the Promenade.

I had driven by the Promenade area before, but never really looked at the area.  Wow, have I been missing out.  This is a great area.  A Dave and Busters, a 24 screen theater, a bowling alley, the Ice Arena with three rinks, and a lot more restaurants.  It was a great entertainment complex.  The only thing it was missing was a roller rink and a rock wall.

When I got to the rink, I found a parking spot and headed in.  I found the rink the Standley Lake and Columbine would be playing on and started scouting it so I could figure out where to place my strobes.  I typically like shooting hockey strobed with at least three strobes.  4 is better, 6 is ideal.  But this arena was not going to be easy.  On one side of the rink, there was a plug in, and room for my 13 foot light stand, but on the other side, there were no plug ins in a good location for a second or third strobe.  I ended up setting up a second light in the bleacher area, rigging my 7 foot light stand to a hand rail because there was no room to set the stand up without people tripping over it.  These two lights were going to barely give me coverage of half the ice.

Another drawback of this rink was the glass was 8 feet high all the way around except at the player benches.  And with no holes cut in the glass, that meant shooting either through the dirty, scuffed glass or up in the bleachers.  Unfortunately, the bleachers really were not high enough to shoot from and get over the glass, and so I headed down to shoot through the glass.

Shooting through the glass, you can get glare, the scuffs and scratches can confuse the autofocus of todays cameras, and they can also degrade the image quality.  You also have to adjust your exposure a bit for shooting through glass.

My two lights just were not enough to give me the light quality that I really wanted, but I had to make do.  I had not shot Standley Lake hockey before, but, they had beaten Ralston Valley, who I think is the team to beat for the State Championship this year, and I had no clue how good Columbine was going into this game.

Standley Lake is a good team, but I was not really wowed by them.  Columbine looked ok.  The boys knew how to skate, and I saw some hockey talent, but they really did not have a team attitude yet.  The Gator’s jumped out to a 2-0 lead after on period, and both teams went scoreless in the second period.

Lake added on 3 goals in the final period, but Columbine started to come together and finally found the back of the net two times in the 3rd period but were unable to dig out of the hole the Gator’s had put them in early.  Lake would go on to beat the visiting Rebels 5-2.

 

To view and purchase photos from this game, please visit my MaxPreps gallery for the contest.