Photo: The outreached arm of the Sharks netminder falls short of another Hawks goal.

With hockey probably being the fastest sport that isn’t measured in horsepower, it’s glimpses like this which break the game down into frozen moments that make we want to shoot the sport more often.

Not to mention get back out there myself.

- Kris

Photo: Blackhawks defensemen Duncan Keith releases a blast from far boards.

Thinking of starting another hockey week by going through photos from old games and either retouching them or giving them a little creative adjustment like you see here.

It’s February already, and I have two Wolves games coming up near the end of the month with similar seats to those we had last time – nice and close. More details on that coming soon.

– Kris

We’re here at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the Hawks game, and I have my Dell Mini with me so I was inspired to post a quick hockey pic from last season.

Unfortunately, our captain and today’s photo subject, Jonathan Toews is missing his 4th game in a row with concussion-like symptoms, but hopefully he’ll be back soon.

The good news is the Hawks just scored on the power play (finally!) and we’re up 2-0 in the middle of the 2nd period against the Habs.

Let’s Go Hawks!

Taking a break for the Maui photos for a few hours, I wanted to try out a few of the Photoshop techniques that I learned at the Maui Photo Festival a few weeks back.

This shot is from the photos I took from the Hawks / Sharks matchup back in March.  After seeing photos used in promotional materials with the Hawks’ awesome red home jerseys highlighted against grey-toned backdrops, I wanted to give it a shot myself.  So that’s what I was playing around with a for a few hours last night.

In this shot, I also highlighted the goaltender and added a blur effect to everything else in the frame.  Here’s the original shot.

This particular photo was one I spent the most time on, and here are the two others that I did a little practice on first.

And now, back to all those Maui photos I need to go through.

I’m still in a hockey sort of mood after a big win by the Blackhawks in Vancouver last night. I could really get used to post-season hockey here in Chicago for years to come.

Our hometown Hawks advanced to the 2nd round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs last night, so I decided to throw up a recent hockey photo. Unfortunately, the shooter pictured here, former Blackhawk Jeremy Roenick, was eliminated from the playoffs when his San Jose Sharks were upset by the Anaheim Ducks.

One of the five goals that made it past Nabokov in regulation.

My main goal was getting some up-close action shots, which not only meant shooting in continuous mode, but also shooting in JPEG mode and not RAW. Switching to JPEG mode gave me the ability to shoot up to 53 continuous captures, as opposed to only 6 using RAW mode (Source: Canon Rebel XSi Specs).  While I didn’t come close to 53 shots in a row, I did end up with close to 1,100 photos from the game. Needless to say, that required a little bit more time to review and process afterwards.

In the end, I selected just over 50 of the better photos from the night and uploaded them to Flickr. Here are a few of those as a preview, and you can view them all on Flickr if you’d like to see more.

Flickr Photoset: Hawks vs. Sharks – 3/25/09

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The Hawks Dustin Byfuglien is robbed by the Sharks Evgeni Nabokov from point blank range.

Blackhawk’s Jonathan Toews entering Shark infested territory (March 2008).