Jim,

your last statement, is, by definition ... sports/action shooting ... the bane of photography, especially indoors or in the evening. While shortening the shutter speed will tend to freeze the action, it whacks down the light pretty good, too. Just speeding the camera from 1/60th sec to 1/125 cleaves the light in half. Going to 1/250 sec cleaves it in half, again.

Wider Aperture, if the lens has it available, will help in this, but carries a penalty of cutting down what is in focus and what is not, due to the depth of field (DoF). The longer the lens, the tighter this plane of focus becomes. You will have to understand this relationship, if you go wider than f/4 towards f/1.4, as it will rear its head.

Try not to forget that you can also up the ISO setting to compensate for a lack of light, to a certain extent. Try not to exceed ISO-1600, as the digital noise from the sensor will tend to creep in and populate expanses of shadows and background. It can also reduce the sharpness of edges and make everything look a little ... dirty.


Good luck with your efforts ... and pay close attention to all three of these related adjustments. It usually is more than one setting attribute that becomes the real "solution" for your best image.