Lens for high school football games

kcwhitaker

Hi @Moose - I just got a T2i and I would like to know which lens you would recommend to take pictures of my sons football games from the stands. Most games will be in the evening and about 50 yards away. I would like to keep my budget around $500 or so if possible. Please help!

Moose

Howdy @kcwhitaker - On of the toughest things to shoot is fast action in low light...especially from a distance. With a budget of $500, your best bet would be the Canon EF 70-300mm IS USM (see here).

When coupled with the T2i, you'll have an effective field of view comparable to a 480mm lens attached to a full frame DSLR (like the Canon 5D)...which means you'll be able to zoom in quite a bit from the stands.

The lens comes equipped with an ultra sonic focusing motor (USM) which will speed up focusing and give you quieter operation. Image stabilization is also included, however, for sports shots at night it really won't help you out...unless you capture him right before the snap (less subject movement).

Ideally, you would want to shoot with a telephoto lens that could get down to f/2.8 (these lenses can be very expensive and heavy), because lower f-numbers allow more light into the camera. More light equals faster shutter speeds at lower ISO's...which basically means sharper shots with less image noise.

Because this lens can only obtain apertures as low as f/4-5.6, you'll have to get used to image noise (grain). In order to get fast enough shutter speeds to freeze subject action in low light, you'll be forced to use higher ISO's, which produce heavy amounts of image noise.

You can clean some of this up in post-processing. Adobe Lightroom (see here) has a good noise removal tool and will allow you to do batch processing.

Anyway, that should get you going in the right direction. Happy shooting! :)