some advice please

[AMonthOfSundays]

I know many of the photographers on this board like taking more of the artsy photos (as do I) but being an involved high school student I decided to join the school newspaper and that means shooting at football games. Now we have unusually bad lighting at out field and it makes it even MORE difficult to shoot. I have a rebel xt and im using a canon 50mm 1.8. The focal length is quite acceptable for me because they allow me go stand pretty much anywhere and I have a good enough knowledge of the game to predict what’s coming. My usual settings are 1/125 ISO 800 and the lens opened to 1.8. This at first surprised me at how well it worked with no visible grain and no blur due to movement but the Achilles heel was focusing and during many potentially great photos the players where out of focus. Now this lens is not very a very fast focusing lens and this is likely the problem but what do you expect for 80$. So my question is would it be worth bumping it up to ISO 1600 and lets say 2.8 to give a little room to work with as far as focusing goes? Would the increase in depth of field really be worth putting up with the noise at 1600?

 

[tnle2]

I use to be a photographer for my high school newspaper and I shot football too. Back then I used ISO 1600 film and I had to resort to the same 50mm f/1.8 lens to get 1/125 or maybe 1/250.

My advice would be to bump it up to 1600 and get the extra stop for DOF since you are finding that 1/125 is stopping the motion well enough. I don't know if your newspaper half-tones the photos before press but if it does the noise from 1600 isn't going to matter anyway. Even if it doesn't, my guess is the quality of printed newspaper isn't all that great that you would notice the noise.

The one extra stop isn't going to help DOF a lot but it's better than nothing I suppose. You're already dealing with low light so the AF system isn't going to be as fast as in better light. Also, you might want to shoot with fill flash with some minus flash compensation. With a 50mm you're going to be limited to shots where the action is near the sidelines and at the position the overhead lights tend to cast nasty shadows on the players. Fill flash should help with this and you might be able to live with closing the aperture even a few stops more for a little deeper DOF.

 

[Petrus]

You could also practice focusing manually. I did that (but in -71 we did not have anything else...) Autofocus is a recent invention, and not perfect yet.

After some practice you can actually focus by estimation, you left hand will learn how much to turn for each distance using infinity as reference if needed.
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Addendum after a good night's sleep: with new lenses old-school [sic] focusing is not possible, as the focusing ring is not really connected to the focus mechanism. In the good old days you could turn the ring to infinity stop and then turn back to the desired distance by the feel only.