Need Tips for Photographing Ice Hockey - First Time Shooting Sports

Hey everyone! In a couple of weeks, I'll be photographing an ice hockey match for my local team. This is my first foray into sports photography as I normally shoot weddings and newborn, although I've got a good amount of experience with the camera in other areas. I'd really appreciate any tips or tricks specifically for capturing the fast-paced action of hockey. What should I look out for? Any particular settings or techniques that work best? Thanks in advance for your advice!

This is free gig I'm doing for a local blogger and doing it to gain experience.  One of the goals I'm trying to accomplish is do things outside my norm.  This is a big start. 

Thanks for any help you can offer.  

Sports/Action photography, especially indoor sports/action photography is the toughest photographic discipline there is. You capture what happens, it happens fast, and they will not recreate something for you because you missed the shot.

What gear do you have?

TCav wrote: Sports/Action photography, especially indoor sports/action photography is the toughest photographic discipline there is. You capture what happens, it happens fast, and they will not recreate something for you because you missed the shot.

What gear do you have?

My husband was saying the same thing about needing to learn the sports as well.  I have Nikon D810, 70-200mm and 24-70mm both f/2.8.  Oh and a 105mm.

First: Practice. Practice. Practice.

Second: There are two big considerations. Light and speed. The bad news is that indoor sports venues always have bad lighting unless the venue has a television contract, which I doubt yours will have. The good news is that ice is white, so you'll have more light than if you were shooting basketball, for instance. The bad news is that hockey is faster than basketball, so you'll need to get faster shutter speeds in order to capture the action, which negates the advantage of the additional light you'll have from shooting on ice. So, yeah, that's a wash.

Third: Your 70-200/2.8 should be your lens of choice. The maximum aperture of f/2.8 will help you get as much light as possible, so I'd recommend that you shoot using A (Aperture Priority) to keep the aperture wide open. The focal length might not be ideal on a 'Full Frame' camera, but your D810 has a 36MP image sensor, so you'll be able to do some cropping and still get good images.

Set the Auto ISO Sensitivity Control to On, and set the Minimum Shutter Speed to 1/250. (In general, when shooting any human activity without benefit of any mechanical advantage, 1/160 is fine, but hockey sticks provide a mechanical advantage, so 1/250 is more appropriate, keeping in mind that SOME motion blur adds to the drama in this type of photography.) Most of your images will be white, so noise won't be much of an issue, but you will get some on the players and crowd, if the lighting is especially bad.

Use AF-C (Continuous-servo AF), CH (Continuous high speed), and JPEG fine. (Don't bother with NEF. That will slow down the continuous shooting, eat up your memory, and leave you with a lot of RAW images to process.)

Fourth: Bring an extra battery (if you don't have a vertical grip) and extra cards.

Fifth: Practice. Practice. Practice. Go to the team's practice sessions to get a feel for the action.

Sixth: Practice. Practice. Practice.

Also, try to get good shots of the faces of every player on your team.

And move around.

Watch some hockey on TV and see what those camera peeps are capturing.  I get you are doing photography, but this will train your eyes to look for things as it happens.