Hockey 'Shoot-out'

It's been a busy few weeks for me... I've done a lot of shooting in that time, so much that I'm thinking I need to get a backup Digital SLR. Right now, I use my F5 as backup, but it shoots film and that is just becoming impractical now. The F5 is a legendary film camera so I'm very unenthusiastic to sell it, but I could use the money on a brand spanking new Nikon D40x - a cheap and small 10MP Digital SLR which would be a perfect to keep in the photo bag for when things go bad :( Electronic items tend to breakdown after heavy use and as well built as my main camera, the D200 is, I've seen it act oddly at the end of the day after a heavy shoot. It hasn't failed on me yet, but I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing that if it dies during the middle of an event, I can still keep shooting. Especially now, since I'm doing a lot more shooting, and investing time to go on day trips just to shoot some new pix.

Other than that, the last big photo event I had was on Sunday at the Ricoh Centre in Toronto. Jake's House a charitable institute providing support for families with autistic children organized a charity hockey tournament. The tournament culminated in one final exhibition game featuring NHL alumni players as well like ex-Toronto Maple Leafers Wilf Pieament and Mark Laforest. Jake's House needed volunteer photographers to cover this special event and a bunch of us from the OPC signed up.

It was a great opportunity to not only help out a great charity but to also gain some excellent experience in shooting some tough events. It was a long and tough day but very rewarding. The photographers were given unrestricted access to everywhere in the Centre - the actual ice, locker rooms, crowds etc. We pretty much had to coordinate ourselves and make sure we covered the whole venue including the the fans, the players, the special guests and of course the kids. I found I had to keep a watchful eye to where other photographers were, and what they were shooting, so that I could make sure I was shooting in the opposite direction and not getting the same shots.
The only problem was, though I knew I was next to some great ex-NHL players, but not being very knowledgable on the sport, I had no idea who they were!

Anyways, we all ended up with some good shots and hopefully Jake's House will find them useful for their advertising and website and it'll help bring about more awareness for their program.

And here's a sampling of my shots from that day: