Pink in the Rink - San Antonio Rampage

Today's photo is a shot from inside the AT&T Center taken on "Pink in the Rink" night on 28 January 2011, shortly after the San Antonio Rampage (AHL Hockey) defeated the Chicago Wolves 4-1 in front of a franchise record 14,339 fans. The game marked the first time that a special breast cancer awareness night was held by the San Antonio Rampage. It also was the first time that the ice was dyed pink for a game in San Antonio. And finally, before I go into the details of creating the photo, it would not have been possible without our season ticket representative escorting me to the "H.E.B Zone" shortly after the game was finished so I could take the shots that I needed to create this photo.

I ended up taking several bracketed shots 1 EV apart, ranging from -5 through +6, to fully capture the lighting and detail that I needed. I got lucky and my first few shots were taken when the Rampage logo was on the scoreboard and the displays circling the AT&T Center were still on (they were turned off once I hit the +1, +2, and +3 brackets). Fortunately I was able to merge the shots together partially by hand to present the best overall representation of the displays, rather than it just looking gray because they were turned off. I took a total of 27 shots and ended up using about half of them in the creation of this photo.

The pink ice was by far the most difficult part of this photo to process, as I wanted to make it stand out color-wise a touch more than it really was when I was able to take the shots, although it looked pretty similar to this photo color wise before the game started (if you would like to see one of the photos I took with my cellphone prior to the game, please click here). Getting the pink ice to render the way I wanted without being too bright or too colored in certain areas required using most of the under exposed brackets to blend certain areas on the ice for the overall shot to appear as natural as possible. One neat part of the shot is also the pink reflection on the glass surrounding the rink as well as the rafters/beams high atop the AT&T Center. I don't know if the lighting looks similar during other events, but having the pink reflection in this photo I feel adds quite a nice touch to the overall composure of the shot.

As always, please feel free to leave any comments or feedback, and remember clicking on the photo takes you to my online gallery hosted at smugmug, where you can view this (and any other of my photos) in various sizes. Thanks for stopping by!

Pink in the Rink - San Antonio Rampage - 28 January 2011