Hockey is a tough sport to photograph. The white ice wreaks havoc with automatic exposure. The sodium-vapor lights cast weird, ever-shifting hues on the players. The fast action demands high shutter speeds. The list goes on, but no matter: the challenge makes it fun.

I decided to take some photos at the Stanford versus UCLA hockey game this afternoon in Redwood City. The light conditions inside the arena were as poor as expected, so I had to adapt.

First, I went to the open Zamboni door before the game and cleaned off the inside and outside of a section of glass. Since I couldn’t shoot over the glass, my cleaning made the glass as clear as possible to shoot through. I also cleaned a second, similar spot on the other end of the rink. Second, I configured my camera for low-light conditions: f/2.8 at ISO1000 to ISO1600. I wanted to freeze the action, so I went with a shutter speed of 1/320 to 1/400 second. The sodium-vapor lights were awful from a white-balance perspective, so I shot in RAW to ease post-processing.

Composition was always a challenge. The game moved very quickly, so it was necessary to predict where the play would go in order to get decent shots. Getting the correct focus, even with autofocus, was another problem. I eventually used a combination of one-shot, auto-point-selection autofocus with immediate manual tweaks.

I ended up taking almost 600 shots during the game. That might sound like a lot, but a good number of those came in high-speed bursts, so the actual number of “composed” shots was much smaller. Of those, I isolated about two dozen for extra consideration. After careful analysis, two of those made the final cut as action photos:

There were some decent non-action photos; I might post them some day.

What would I do differently? Several things:

• Get better access, perhaps a spot to stand at the end of the bench, so that I wouldn’t need to shoot through glass
• Bring strobes; that would help tremendously with the poor light (even at IS01600 and f/2.8, a shutter speed of 1/400 left the shots almost two stops underexposed)
• Do a closer analysis of acknowledged “great” hockey photos to improve my composition and timing

A little over a week has gone by in my 15-week photo challenge, and I must admit to having had a bit of difficulty in coming up with a theme for the second week. No more: the theme for today through Sunday is “motion.”

The first photo of the week:

As always, you can see the latest photos in my photo challenge Flickr set.

I know that computers don’t have souls.  I know that computers don’t have feelings.  Even so, I feel bad when I cast aside a beloved old computer and replace it with a faster, more capable upstart.

Ever since I got a new laptop last August, I have been using my desktop computer less and less.  The desktop’s only real advantage was its monitor, which had vastly superior color reproduction compared with my laptop’s screen.

Seriously, the color on my Dell laptop’s 15.4″ WUXGA screen is atrocious.  It’s bad enough to be basically unusable for photography work.  No amount of calibration seems to fix the problem.  Solution?  Hook up the desktop’s Dell 2001FP, which has fantastic color, to my laptop and go dual-headed.

That relegated the desktop to file/print server status.  The last nail in the coffin will be driven home when I get around to buying an external hard drive for my laptop.

So long, trusty steed.

Hi. It’s me. I have a confession to make.

I have an on-again, off-again relationship with most of my hobbies.

The latest interest to see rejuvenated enthusiasm is photography. That’s why, in the spirit of New Year’s resolutions and the 100/100/100 challenge, I am going to give myself a photography assignment. For the next 15 weeks, I will post a photo every day, taken that day. Just one.

Each week will have a theme (e.g., sports action) or a constraint (e.g., shutter open at least one second), maybe both. In order to keep my main blog uncluttered, I’m going to do all of the daily posting over at my Flickr page, but I might talk about it with less-than-daily frequency here. The good ol’ photoblog just isn’t going to cut it.

Time to get started. The first week’s constraint is that I must use my 50mm lens and cannot crop the images in post. Content can be whatever I find interesting — an easy way to get started.

The first photo.

Sadly, there were no Oompa-Loompas.

Last spring, I wrote about my encounter with a 99%-cocoa Lindt chocolate bar, piece that enjoyed strong popularity on Reddit and Digg. Today, I decided to once again expand my chocolate knowledge by visiting… a chocolate factory!

There are several chocolatiers in the Bay area, including Ghirardelli of the eponymous Ghirardelli Square, but I could find only one that offered factory tours: Scharffen Berger.

Scharffen Berger was founded just over a decade ago and has its primary factory in Berkeley, California. I was surprised by the size of the building: quite small, maybe 50 m by 25 m. Its brick construction served well to conceal the treasure within.

The tour began with a discussion of cacao, chocolate, and the genesis of Scharffen Berger. Three-sentence summary: Cacao beans, initially surrounded by a sweet fruit flesh, are repeatedly heated and crushed to eventually become chocolate. Scharffen Berger started when a guy took a vacation in France, was smitten with some chocolate, and decided to pursue a career change away from medicine. Scharffen Berger was one of the first to bring high-cocoa-content dark chocolate to the American consumer, and they did so by handling everything from importing the beans to molding the bars. Delectable chocolate samplings punctuated the talk.

With the classroom out of the way, we went to the production floor.  Machines were crushing the cacao beans, tempering chocolate, and filling molds. This machine smelled delicious:

All along the walls were pallets of raw ingredients and finished products:

Like I mentioned, there were no Oompa-Loompas, but the people in this room seemed abnormally short:

The factory tour was a bit underwhelming. The factory was so small that I was left thinking, “That’s it?” On the other hand, the staff was friendly, and I learned some things about chocolate. It was a decent experience.