Sports lenses for indoor and outdoor action

Comments

• Moose

  May 2012 edited May 2012

  Howdy @vixdancing - With a budget of $800, I would go with one of the following options...
  
  1. Canon 70-200mm f/4L (see here) - Great for indoor and outdoor sports. Will result in slightly higher ISO's in order to get shutter speeds fast enough to freeze fast action.
  
  2. Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 (see here) or Tamron 70-200mm f/2.8 (see here) - These lenses offer a "brighter" maximum aperture which will give you the ability to shoot at lower ISO's while maintaining fast shutter speeds.
  
  3. Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L (see here) - This lens offers the best combination of sharpness, focus speed and a super "bright" f/2.8 aperture for reduced image noise in low light.
  
  When it comes to shooting sports, shutter speed is king. If your shutter speed is too slow, then you end up with a blurry mess.
  
  One of the troubles when shooting in low light (indoors or outdoors at dusk/night) is the fact that shutter speeds naturally slow down as the light levels drop.
  
  In order to retain fast shutter speeds, your T2i will naturally raise the ISO in order to make the image sensor more sensitive to light. Unfortunately this introduces heavy amounts of image noise (grain) into your shots.
  
  To combat the ISO dilemma, a lens with a "brighter" maximum aperture (lower f-number) will allow more light into your camera which helps keep the ISO down and the shutter speeds up.
  
  In laymans terms, if your lens can obtain an aperture of f/2.8 while shooting at full zoom (200mm), you'll be able to use a lower ISO when compared to a lens that can only go down to f/4 or f/5.6 while shooting at full zoom (200mm).
  
  Hope that all makes sense and happy shooting! :)
• vixdancing

  May 2012

  It does! Thanks so much, I'm really enjoying your site by the way. :)