Minnesota Wild General Manager Chuck Fletcher announced Wednesday that the team has agreed to terms with goaltender Josh Harding on a one-year contract prior to a scheduled arbitration hearing in Toronto.
There’s a great article today on NHL.com about goaltending records. If you’re into the obscure, you especially enjoy things like:
Who faced the most shots without giving up a goal over his (admittedly very brief) entire career?
Who are the only goalies with exactly 1.00 career GAA?
Best career shootout save percentage?
Only goalie to score a goal in both the regular season and the playoffs?
The Toronto Star reports that Leafs GM Brian Burke is looking to give Justin Pogge a fresh start, presumably elsewhere in the AHL, and presumably someplace with less pressure and lower expectations than the hockey-obsessed market of Toronto.
Pogge, drafted 90th overall by the Leafs in 2004, just signed Toronto’s qualifying offer, a one-year, two-way contract that will pay him $605,000 at the NHL level. Since Pogge needed almost a month to agree to the offer presented to him in late June, presumably it took the assurance of a move to greener pastures for the netminder to put pen to paper.
Justin Pogge – Photo by Fred Trask
Ten days ago, we rounded up the first batch of free agency moves affecting AHL goalies around the land, and as teams develop their goaltending strategies, things just keep getting more interesting. Here are the latest roster moves and continued AHL goalie news.
Braden Holtby is back to work and learned a lot from participating in the Bears Calder Cup-winning playoff run. (Patriot-News.com)
Braden Holtby Photo by CapsinPictures
Setting your white balance manually plays a large part of getting professional quality hockey photographs. Read on to learn more about what white balance is, how it affects your photography, and most importantly some key tips on how to set it in an arena
Hockey can be one of the toughest sports to photograph due to difficult lighting, dirty plexiglass and cold temperatures. So over the next few weeks I’d like to share my techniques that I’ve learned over the past couple of years.
My goal whether I’m shooting hockey or any other sport is to get the exposure correct in the camera the first time so I don’t have to do a lot of post processing when I get home. If I’ve done everything correctly all I have to do is straighten my horizons, crop and sharpen the image. An important part of getting the exposure correct is understanding the role color temperature plays in setting the white balance.
What are we doing when we change the white balance in the camera? We are identifying what the color white is under the current lighting condition. Our eyes are able to adjust to different color temperatures because we’ve taught our brains what white looks like under different types of light, daylight, tungsten, fluorescent. The camera from time to time needs a little help.
The reason that pictures turn out with a yellow/orange cast in incandescent (tungsten) lighting and bluish in fluorescent lighting is because light has a color temperature. A low color temperature shifts light toward the red; a high color temperature shifts light toward the blue. Different light sources emit light at different color temperatures, and thus the color cast. The chart below (Figure 1) will give you an idea where the different light sources fall in the within the light spectrum. All the temperatures on the right side of the chart are in Kelvin, which is Celsius + 273.15. Check out Wikipedia for a more complete definition of Kelvin.
Figure 1
Most digital cameras today have the ability to set white balance through a series 0f presets in the menu of the camera. This is where we tell the image sensor in the camera to shift the color for the appropriate light.
The three presets that work the best for hockey are Manual, Auto and Fluorescent. I’ve found setting the white balance manually to be the most effective way to get the white of the uniforms and ice to look white( figure 2). Auto tends to work well but I’ve found the uniforms have a gray look to them(figure 3). This because the sensor is trying to make all the neutral colors an 18% middle gray. Fluorescent for me give me a bit of a blue cast over the picture so I rarely use it. (figure 4)
Figure 2
Figure 2. White balance set manually
Figure 3
Figure 3. White balance set to Auto
Figure 4
Figure 4.White balance set to fluorescent
There are a number of ways to manually set the white balance. My preferred method is to set a custom white balance off of the ice once the teams finish their pre game warm up and before the zamboni cleans the ice. This is because the reflectivity of the ice changes when the zamboni cleans it. Point the camera towards a well lit section of the ice, make sure there are no colored lines in the frame, and manually set the white balance. If there are colored lines in the frame they will throw off the rest of the colors in your pictures.
Another popular way of setting the white balance is to use an 18% gray card. Place the gray card in front of the camera, make sure the light reflecting off the card is the same light illuminating the ice and take the reading.
This is just one of the ways I try to make my pictures look the best they can. If anyone has any other techniques they would like to share please feel to send in a picture and a small explanation of how you took it.
Since the season ended and free agency began, teams have been on the move setting up goalie depth for their organizations. At this point, I think we can get a good idea of who may be between the pipes for many of the AHL teams.
Still, some parent clubs have signed so many goalies, there are sure to be some good battles for both the NHL and AHL spots around the league. On the flip side, several quality goaltenders at all levels of the game remain unsigned, from NHLer Marty Biron to AHL journeyman Nolan Schaefer.
Those are the moves that have made headlines thus far in off-season. I’ll be back with with a more definitive list of AHL goalies for each team as the summer wears on and roster firm up.
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Header image by Scott Slingsby
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