Shooting hockey: dealing with low contrast

At yesterday’s ice hockey game, I used Canon EF 300mm f/2.8L IS USM lens to shoot the action through transparent plastic panels that surrounded the rink for safety of the fans. The panels were covered with scuff marks from the puck hits, which did not interfere with focussing, since the lens hood was, practically, touching the panels. However, the resulting photos showed significant loss of contrast.

I corrected the images in Lightroom by moving “Blacks” slider to the left until the black levels are clipped (around -75 in most of my images). To compensate for the large amount of light reflected from the ice surface, the “Highlights” slider also has be moved to the left (my typical values were around -50).

Generally, I found that the 300mm f/2.8L lens worked well on a full-frame camera (Canon EOS-1D X). A friend of mine was shooting with a Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II USM lens on his Canon EOS 7D Mark II (with a crop sensor), which gave him more flexibility of a range of focal lengths without sacrificing the reach at the long end of the zoom range.