Pictured above – In the opening moments of the game, Otters #2 and #3 dug the puck out of this scramble and got Huntsville on the scoreboard.
Huntsville Otters 2018 Duke Knox Hockey Tournament Photos
Thank you Otters for inviting me out to photograph some of your hockey games! I always enjoyed photographing the team last season and getting familiar with the players, their playing styles and personalities on the ice. Each Otter had his trademark way of getting ready for a play, skating, stick handling and reacting to goals scored for and against. It was fun to spot that individuality and then try to capture it in photos. This year it was impressive to see how the returning players have grown as hockey players and good to see so many new faces too.
Thank you to the coaches as well for allowing me to get some time on the bench to shoot photos. I like to vary my shooting position to increase the variety of photographs, spending most time in the corners and around the net as typically done for NHL games. Having some time on the bench was nice for getting clear shots in the neutral zone. I just hope I wasn’t in the way too much in there! Come to think of it, when I played hockey I was always a goalie and never did get much experience with bench routines, such as getting out of the way of the doors, and not stepping on whiteboards and knocking over water-bottles (or the coach’s Gatorade). The goalie’s job is to get in the way as much as possible so that’s really all I ever worked on. Thanks coaches for allowing me some space back there to do what I do best.
In all I shot a lot of photos during the two Otters hockey games and today am posting Part 1, the first 50 I’ve processed – all photographs taken in the early stages of the first game. To keep pages at a manageable size for browsing, the galleries will be broken down to about 50 photos per page. Not every player on the team will show up on every page. If a player is missing from one gallery page he’ll show up in others. As more batches of hockey photographs are processed I’ll continue updating the gallery pages with new parts. Navigation links will be put in on each page so no matter where you land on the site you’ll find links taking you to all the other parts of the Huntsville Otters 2018 Duke Knox hockey photo collection.
The reason all the photos aren’t flooding the website at once is that I’m taking time to properly process each photo one-at-a-time. Most photographers, specially community sports photographers, skip that step as it’s extremely time-consuming, and doing it well involves a solid background in photo-editing. I feel it’s important to not take any shortcuts. To me, kids hockey photos and their candid portraits are just as important as wedding photos and they deserve the same care in how they are created and prepared. I want to provide you with photos that are prepared as best as they can be, ready to use as you like without any need for adjusting or fussing on your end. That work takes extra time so batches of your hockey photos will appear here over the next few days or so.
These days the vast majority of people prefer to have photos that are ideal for screen display, on their phones and tablets, shared with friends and family on social media or by email, so the files I’ve prepared here are optimized for screen use. If you would like files for printing purposes please let me know. Setting up files for print is quite different than setting up files for screen display. It would take far too long to create all the files for all the possible print sizes people might want – so it would be best if I create print versions by request.
I hope you’ll enjoy the photos! Here’s part 1 of the 2018 Huntsville Otters Duke Knox hockey photographs. More coming soon…
The thumbnail grid below repeats all the same photographs seen in the gallery section on the page, and is included here for those needing an alternate way to download and save their photos.
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