We shoot night track meets pretty regularly with stadium lighting. There are several keys I suggest:
1. tweak your image as you go (alt+1 while not capturing and lighten as needed) but be careful that you have your event *open* as you can't capture directly in the hardware control :-).
2. make sure you are on a pure white finish, we always put a white banner behind the line and then tape our line with white duck brand tape ... stadium lines are just not clean because of texture and color bleed (and wear)
3. start with your gain set higher (circle i on camera, manual, go with a higher gain to start as more light will come in) get a good picture and then go to auto gain (if light not changing don't really need auto on). Pay attention to the maximum gain! Oh, and open your aperture of course -- but that means depth of field is narrower so focus carefully. Once you get these settings tweaked write them down as a reference.
4. See if they have all lights pointed at the 50 if they can adjust one light towards the finish next time they are changing a bulb :-)
I would be more concerned about someone kicking out a cord on the light or a bulb burning out at a critical moment.
Go out and practice when you are not under meet pressures and I think you will find that you can get pretty good pictures without additional lighting. If you do go with a light source consider two so that failure of one won't be catastrophic.
Pay real attention to contrast if you are using auto-capture. At a dusk event we tweak between every event sometimes and check auto-capture as you can have a failure if you get dark suddenly.
If you don't have auto-capture contact me to discuss what it will do for you! It is the bomb. When you first find it you won't believe you used that capture button all of those years!
Don
http://michianatiming.com616-821-3156
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