What do you do when things work against you ? Break the rules

Some times I get into situations where the conditions are challenging at best. Last week I was shooting an event for the Ice Hockey club for a “fun” game. I know the venue pretty well. When I got there I noticed things did not look normal, dialing my in my regular settings : ISO 1600 F2.8 1/1,000 and the viewfinder was pretty much dark. Not good, I did change the speed and at 1/60s things where roughly where I wanted it to be. Not ideal to take action pictures. On the Positive I had the space between the benches which meant no plexiglass between the action and me. I decided to take out my spare speed-light, after getting the OK from the organizer of the game.

Flash has it’s own challenges and 1/250s is not ideal for action, time to switch to HSS which means drain on the batteries, thankfully the Godox external pack is great for this kind of abuse. Eventually at the end of the game the recycle time did dramatically increase, I really did push the flash to hits limits. the auto zoom had to work hard with me following the action.

The result is rather pleasing even if the reflection on the ice / glass are a major pain to work with. Still better than very high ISO pictures. Interesting is that nobody did complain about me using flash and they did not really notice it. Would I use this again for another event ? If I had the ref and league approval probably, however I would love to be able to put real big strobes on the top of the arena, …. I can dream and hope this may be possible when they build the new venue, I guess it will be reserved for the wire service. At least I have a backup for small league games and I did practice and master a new skill

Here a sample gallery most are shot at ISO 1,000 f2.8 and 1/500s all shot with the Sony A99, not the A99II there was no need for high frame rate of big files which take just longer to work with.