Some pointers for shooting people...?

We're having an "Olympics" type lunch at work next week and I will probably haul the cam in to take pics of the Sumo wrestling in our warehouse (my dad is wrestling, and good pics = epic blackmail). I don't usually take pics of people, so what pointers can you give me for lighting them correctly? I wouldn't call myself an amateur, nor a pro...

Body: Canon Digital Rebel
Lens: Kit 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6
Location: Warehouse with sodium HID lighting...

I don't have an off camera flash , so that's why I'm asking about lighting. I want to avoid using the flash at all costs, but if i have to I can probably rig up a diffuser for it by next week.


I'll obviously be shooting raw, but probably in shutter priority and turn on bracketing just in case...

shooting raw will help with your white balance for the light color...but flash can really help...cause with the kit lens...it just isn't fast enough to stop action unless you bump up the ISO which degrades the quality(esp without flash)

if it were me...i would set it to manual...stop the aperture down as far as it will go(3.5-5.6) and set your shutter speed to however fast you need to make sure you stop action...then turn on your flash and bump your ISO to 400 or so to make the flash's light hit evenly...and adjust the shutter speed from there but keep everything else the same...you should be able to get the overall exposure correct enough that you can fix it in Raw mode...but without the flash i don't see this working well because you don't have a large aperture lens...and the digital rebel can't work high ISO's like the new cameras can...

I've found that on the Rebel, you can bump the ISO as high up as 800 and still not get any very noticeable noise. Try it out and see what you think though.

x2 on the noise. I *accidentally* shot a set of pics at ISO 1600 and they weren't that bad. only bad thing is on the rebel I can't force the aperture down to f/3.6... which will be necessary... I'll go out to the warehouse sometime and see if I can't set shutter priority to 1/60 and see if the camera will bring the aperture to 3.6 for me... it's weird i can't force it to go past 32 for me either

Sometimes instead of trying to use the aperature adjustments to reach the highest or lowest settings, you have to use the shutter priority settings instead. Set the shutter speed to one extreme or the other and you can get lucky and have the aperature set to where you want/need it. Just gotta try it out, I haven't needed to do that yet so I can't offer much advice there.

overexpose high iso pics rather than underexpose.

the kit lens sure doesn't leave you with many options though