I recently have a Canon Digital Rebel XT. I use a Sigma 28-300 mm lens and a canon speedlite 430ex flash. Is there anyway I can take pictures at a high school football game with lights at night without using a flash from the sidelines? I up for buying a lens if necessary, but I would want that lens to also be able to take nice pictures of the outfield at baseball if possible. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks much... :)

Hi ranphotos,

I don't want to sound stupid, but if you simply take the flash off the camera or move the setting to any setting other than automatic, you will be able to take shots without the flash. With sports photography at night, obviously the larger the aperture you can make the better - more light that way, but this means that your depth of field is will be very small - there is a good chance you will creae lot's of shots that are blurry due to movement. What I suggest is that you 1. Use a tripod or monopod for comfort, increase the ISO to make the film as fast as possible, increase the aperture and use either the sports mode (auto multi shots). Also, rather than using the autofocus, you could try using the canon smart focus - specifically for focusing on moving objets.

What you are trying to do is not easy but keep giong!

[Post edited] I used to work for a college newspaper. I was going offer a lengthy ISO film reference, talk about push processing, and documenting aperture settings for different light levels, and then noticed OP has a digital camera, LOL. Oh well, experiment with your manual camera settings and practice manual focusing with a monopod as suggested above.

I read up on your camera model. It supports an ISO 1600 mode, which is the film speed we used at the paper for almost all sports and press conference shots where we weren't close enough for flash or it would have been too distracting. I'd say start experimenting there and decrease the ISO as you go. You have the advantage of getting instant feedback on your shots without the need to wait for the film to be developed to see if any of your shots are good.

You have a very slow* lens. This means that you, once you zoom out, have a lens with a small aperture #, such as f5.6. this will only let you use a slow* shutter speed, causing blur. Your camera will produce dreadful images at any iso # greater than 400. (and not too clear at 400) your only recourse other than having the arena allow you to place powerful flashes above and around the action ,as the pros do, is to buy a faster (f2.8) lens. You can find used ones on craig's list and eBay for reasonable prices compared to buying new. I hope this helps, boyd.