Originally posted by VisualDarkness Wow. they are tack sharp compared to my attempts! How are you doing that through the glass?
Nice to realize that I may be just a tad hard on myself in my quest for excellence ;D
I think it all starts with a fast lens, in this case the Tamron 70-200 f2.8. After that it's a battle between sensitivity and shutter speed - then again, when exactly that isn't the case in sports...
Anyways, my settings were mainly (full manual) ISO 2500 - 3200, 1/500 - 1/800, f/2.8 and a custom WB. Shot RAW and PP with Lightroom. I think the most important thing is to get things as close to perfect in camera. In my first attempts I under exposed too much and got the WB all wrong and that was impossible to fix in post. Green faces, noise, way less sharp than these ones, etc. Now I kept checking my settings all the time to make sure there's no under exposure and that the WB looked good. Also, I tried to shoot as directly through the glass as possible to minimize its effect on the sharpness and tone. And that's it basically.
In post I used a grad filter to darken the ice a bit and make its texture more visible, tweaked the WB only slightly and adjusted the exposure. No sharpening nor noise reduction.