Need some lens advice for low light action

[macbigyin]

I've been asked to do a shoot for the local boy's brigade in a couple of weeks and was down at the venue last night. Despite a serious number of flourescent lights, I had to ramp my camera up to iso 3200 to obtain a decent shutter speed and even minimum aperture.

I only have the standard nikon 18-55 kit lens and their 55-200 version to use, which will both go as low as f4.

I was wondering, is it time now to invest in a 50mm prime, either the 1.8 or 1,4 version, as I had intended to do this later on in the year anyway.

Would this be up to the job of the low light stuff? I can use my flashgun and standard lenses for the inspection and prize giving etc, but want to try and avoid the flashgun whilst they are doing their other pieces which are more high speed. I reckon I need to get a shutter speed of at least 160th of a sec for these.

Any advice form those with one of these lenses woudl be greatly appreciated

 

[desantnik]

Generally a f4 lens will not be good enough to use indoors (unless your subject is particularly well lit - far more than normal things are). You'd have to use flash to help you and for that you'd need a decent flashgun that can do a few tricks like bounce - your pop up flash is both not highly powered (about 11 feet max range) and also produces "blasted" images that aren't exactly pretty.

If you can get a 1.4 lens then you will be 3 stops faster than your f4, that will allow you to bring down your ISO by 3 stops - so ISO400.

However, this will mean that you are shooting with the depth of field produced by f1.4 - which will be tiny! This will give you two problems - #1 nailing the focus on anything but a static subject is tricky #2 unless you want absolute single person subject isolation, your shot will look a bit bizarre.

That and the fact that 50mm quite probably is an awkward length indoors for group shots on a DX body.

 

[macbigyin]

Generally a f4 lens will not be good enough to use indoors (unless your subject is particularly well lit - far more than normal things are). You'd have to use flash to help you and for that you'd need a decent flashgun that can do a few tricks like bounce - your pop up flash is both not highly powered (about 11 feet max range) and also produces "blasted" images that aren't exactly pretty.

If you can get a 1.4 lens then you will be 3 stops faster than your f4, that will allow you to bring down your ISO by 3 stops - so ISO400.

However, this will mean that you are shooting with the depth of field produced by f1.4 - which will be tiny! This will give you two problems - #1 nailing the focus on anything but a static subject is tricky #2 unless you want absolute single person subject isolation, your shot will look a bit bizarre.

That and the fact that 50mm quite probably is an awkward length indoors for group shots on a DX body.

Many thanks,

I had never thought about the DOF with the smaller aperture, I was too transfixed on the shutter speed. Out with the flashgun it is then.