Shoot from as many spots as you can

Why not both?

With sports the general full of thumb is playing surface side (sidelines) or lower (basketball, volleyball, baseball if lucky).

That’s not to say you can’t get some neat shots from not at those angles but they are usually either exceptional (lens mounted directly above home plate shooting down, behind basketball backboard) or part of a larger story (Nebraska volleyball in their football stadium this year as a wide shot showing the scale).

I’ve never shot hockey but there should be cutouts for lenses. Luckily you don’t need a large opening to shoot through.

Wrestling could be much trickier as they pivot so much

I shoot outdoor sports but in terms of manual settings my process is:

Set shutter speed to something that will freeze fastest action (for me 1/1000), set aperture to something that will have a decent DOF and image quality (f/8), then set iso to auto.

If the light gets bad I’ll reduce the aperture first and then the shutter speed but I leave the iso on auto because if it goes too high with my minimum settings I wouldn’t have got a workable photo anyway.

1. Shoot from the glass. Unless you have a lens that is 300mm or longer you will be too far away from the action at the top of most stands.

2. Equipment is your friend. Make do with what you have but a fast lens is key here.

3. White balance off the ice, ideally before it is cut before warmups. Glass will affect color balance, contrast, and light.

4. My typical settings at local rinks are 1/1000, 2.8, ISO around 3200.

5. Back button AF is your friend.

To add on: if you’re shooting hockey, metering is tricky with the ice. You will want to meter the ice to -0- then raise it about 2/3 to 1 stop. So if you meter it at iso 1600, f/2.8, 1/1600, you’d want to click up twice on iso, or down twice on shutter, or one of each.

Thank you everyone for your advice, I will definitely use it and hopefully get some good photos this winter!

Shooting through the glass can be problematic. The glass is DIRTY. smudges, streaks, black marks from pucks. Depending on auto-focus style you may end up with more pics of the glass in focus than players. I shot rink side for 3 or 4 games and never liked it.

You can get reflections of what’s behind the glass in your photos.

I got high enough in stands so the goalies and the far side of the ice were unobstructed. It limits some shots but you can still get plenty of good ones.

The biggest issue is lighting. In older rinks there can be one or two stops difference between the center ice and the corners. My local AHL rink installed LEDs a few years ago and it is nice.

I shot with a Canon 1D MkIV, 300mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 2000, f/3.2 and 1/1000 shutter.