Hockey - curious pink cast on ice???

Hi all,

Great reading on the indoor sports & hockey threads! Based on all your input I

got a Nikon D80 and a Nikon 80-300/2.8D lens to shoot my wife & friends

playing hockey (hard to shoot myself when it's my shift!).

 

My 4th night with the camera, just as I'm getting into the groove on my

settings, I shot an away game at a rink and got these weird pink shadings

across sections of the ice and boards on certain shots. I'm trying to figure

out what caused them.

They can be seen in these pictures:

http://eteamz.active.com/pw-wildcats/albums/index.cfm?id=446813 - compare

these to the shots from the previous game & practice albums (sorry, it's my

first post and I didn't see how to attach a sample pic here)

 

This hadn't happened at the other rinks. I had set a custom white balance,

just as before. The lighting was a little uneven, so I expected some

variations in brightness, but I didn't expect variation in color temp.

 

There is one interesting variable here: this rink was equipped with overhead

radiant heat pipes above the bleacher areas. The other rinks were not. Is it

possible that with ISO set to 1600 the camera was picking up infra-red

reflections from the heaters? The pink didn't seem to shade the players. Any

other ideas on what could have caused this? Thanks!

 

FYI, I shoot on Manual with ISO 1600, 1/320 (or better), F2.8, AF-Continuous,

and I'm still deciding between center-fixed and dynamic spot focusing. This

combo is working real well and I love this camera, but for most of the dark

rinks I still need fair bit of Photoshop work to get to final. I adjust the

levels sliders to spread out the histogram, possibly add a bit of saturation

if I had to shoot through glass, and then after I reduce the image size for

the web I run an unsharp mask to taste with settings of approximately: Amount

100-150%; radius 1.2pxls; threshold 2-20 levels. Each time my results are

getting a little better as I get the hang of things. I did demo Noise Ninja

and it works real well for pics I would want to print; it doesn't add as much

to the quality of smaller web images though. Also, for my use, I found I could

shoot large fine jpgs rather than RAW and come out as well as I needed to

while not running into buffer jams. Saves a lot of time in post loading files

too!

 

Look forward to your input. -Glenn Sanders<div></div>

Oops - I meant 80-200/2.8 on the lens, and was I glad to see the upload link after I hit 'Submit'! Later, -GS

don't use anything automatic... the pink cast is not caused by the heating devices but simply by the lights themsleves.

A custom white balance might help but the bad news is that these lights are actually "blinking" and loosing a lot of intensity... creating th pink, and red casts on some shots when shooting a hi-speed.

Glenn,<br>

Not sure what your white balance setting was with this one, but yikes! Whenever shooting in a new rink, I make sure to shoot a few test frames when the Z is resurfacing the ice, switching between a couple of different WB settings. Even then, I tend to use the Auto WB setting (I'm using a D2H) as I find it really compensates well for variable rink lighting. </p>

 

With results as dramatic as the frame you posted, I have to believe a quick test frame would have revealed the problem up front. Check the EXIF data to see what your WB setting was.</p>

 

Take a look at the frame I've posted, below. As you can see from the ice, you can get a wide variation in light color between individual bulbs in a rink. For this reason, I find that auto WB works well and I correct the most egregious problems in Photoshop.<div></div>

One more.<div></div>

Thanks for your post, Dan! I'd seen a post here suggesting setting a custom WB at each arena, so I've been careful to do that following Nikon's instructions. I set the WB by shooting at a nice white patch of ice, and it's worked well. The test shots I had done pre-warmup (see this attachment) didn't show the extreme amount of shading seen in the first shot, so I was surprised that it was inconsistent - which made me wonder if there may be something other than just a WB issue. Also, the players didn't seem to have their colors distorted like the ice was. Maybe white areas are just more affected than the other colors. Notice the variation on the post-game celebration shots - taken seconds apart - posted below. It makes me wonder if maybe it IS just the flickering of the rink lights. Is it really possible that a rink or arena could be "Camera Incompatible"? Has anyone had a similar experience with a film camera? Finally, I'll post a sample of what my shots are coming out like at the other rinks.<div></div>

Post game celebration shot 1: some pink ice visible; other white areas appear normal<div></div>

Celebration shot 2 - almost no pink shading.<div></div>

Other rinks haven't had this problem at all, using same WB method<div></div>

Glenn,<br>

Non-incandescent lights such as flourescent and mercury vapor, emit light in waves. The color of the light varies at different points along each wave. When we shoot at speeds fast enough to stop the action on the ice, we're only capturing light from a portion of that wave. </p>

 

The only way to get consistent color results when shooting in this kind of light is to use a slower speed (I think around 1/30th of a second) so that you get the entire wave and all of the colors that the light puts out through the cycle.</p>

 

Given this, we will always encounter this problem. All you can really do is to minimize it by taking using the best WB setting you can for the lighting you're dealing with and then correcting after the fact.</p>

The first time I shot hockey, i got this same phenomenon. I didn't realize it was happening until I shot 5-8 frame bursts, that they were all changing colors, frame to frame. Those lights require some luck and lots of shots to eliminate the really strange ones like your example here. good luck.

Wow! I thought it might be something like that, although I hadn't run into it at the other rinks. This one had the Merc Vapor lights. So there are other rinks like this too? Do arenas who care rig some way to get the lights out-of-phase with each other to minimize the effect? Or are all the hockey shooters out there just suffering with getting a certain % of their shots messed up?

I think it's the latter. It's all most rinks can do to make money and keep the ice frozen, let alone worrying about the quality of the lighting for photographers ;-).

 

And out-of-phase lighting is the problem. As each light is in a different part of its cycle, you get one section of the ice orange and the next blue. The only way to fix this would be to somehow synchronize them. I don't even know if there's a reasonable way of doing that if someone wanted to.

 

Just one more cross we photographers must bear.

Dan, some rinks "phase" the lamps in banks, each bank/string of lamps on a different leg of a 3 phase AC system. This balances out the flicker, pulsing effects that are often seen with camera or video usage. Some dont either, and thus the bulbs all flicker together. In movie making their is a greater respect for lighting and its problems. For a rink the lights are often switched as one bank, one one phase, when old goober jackleg does the layout.

I think I met Goober Jackleg once. He was overhauling a Zamboni and wanted me to take a picture of him ice-skiing on a rope behind the Z as his brother Elmer drove it around the rink. Wish I'd kept those shots so I could post them!

I think I met Goober Jackleg once. He was overhauling a Zamboni and wanted me to take a picture of him ice-skiing on a rope behind the Z as his brother Elmer drove it around the rink. Wish I'd kept those shots so I could post them!

Dan is right on with the lights at hockey rinks. The first time I shot hockey I noticed the same thing and kept wondering what I was doing wrong until I read on the net that its the flickering of the waves in the lights. Made me feel a lot better about myself.

 

Dan.... I am curious at how you are able to freeze the action as well as you did at 1/250th. Are you using a strobe at all? I have a D2H with a 70-200mm 2.8 VR and haven't been able to freeze the action of High School hockey players with much success at under 1/320th in available light... any suggestions? Thanks.

Having some blur can be usefull in hockey. One can also pan with the action too. Here is a panned shot at 1/112 second with a 5.5mm lens at F2.8 on a 1.3 megapixel Olympus P&S:<BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/Oct20ArkansasDezainde.jpg?t=1166606737"><BR><BR>Here is a croppeed 35mm shot with a 13.5cm F3.5 Nikkor on a Leica Mm3 at 1/250sec<BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/tripods-456.jpg?t=1166607005"><BR><BR><BR>The next two shots are with cellphones, shot at about 1/29 second, one panned abit more.<BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/tripods-547.jpg?t=1166607149"><BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/tripods-361.jpg?t=1166607295"><BR><BR>Here is a cropped 1/250 sec shot with a 10.5cm F2.5 Nikkor on a M3<BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/tripods-406.jpg?t=1166607369"><BR><BR><BR>Here is a older shot with Royal-X with a Rollei E3 TLR at about 1/125 second. <img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/tripods-452.jpg?t=1166607498"><BR><BR><b>Here is an example of banding, the interaction of a Leica M3 focal plane shutter to a rinks lights. </b> Vapor lamps vary in output over the 50 or 60 hertz cycle, this interacts with the shutter's slit. Keep a notebook of the lighting type and weirdness of each rink you vist. With youth and adult hockey often the lights are less, less banks are turned on.<BR><BR><img src="http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y148/ektar/hockey/tripods-181.jpg?t=1166607644">

Kevin,<br>

I do nothing more than pan with the action. With the lighting in the rinks in my area, I'm never able to shoot at anything better than 1/250 if I want to keep ISO at 800. That speed doesn't sto everything, but those settings seem to yield a good percentage of keepers.<div></div>

Another.<div></div>

We just shot a skating competition and a hockey tourney at 2 rinks recently and had exactly the same problem. We switched to AWB and the problem was 100% better. You can get the same result by post process in PS, but it got us much closer for our viewing stations.

 

If you look critically at the lights in some local arenas, you probably will see some red, some greenish and some neutral lights. I suspect that it's simply old/new, one brand vs another or any other stupid answer. It shows to the eye and it's far worse in the images. Major centres will have color corrected lights for TV use.

 

Lots of shots we had were showing one side redish & one side greenish. One person commented and I simply walked them over to the doorway and they could see the lights were exactly as we shot them. You can partly fix in PS quickly, full fix is a little more work.

 

Doug