advice on flash for sports

I'm just a hobbyist looking to shoot some indoor sports stuff;
wrestling, basketball, gymnastics, etc. I just took some pictures at
a wrestling match.

I set my camera's ISO to 1600; it's a Canon 10D. The light was still
to low for decent shutter speeds so I used the camera's built in
flash. The lens I'm using is the Canon 28-135 zoom. It was usually
zoomed all the way out.

Pretty much every picture has terrible red eye. At least any where
the eyes are visible at all, even ones where their head is facing
sideways.

I'm wondering if I were to get a flash that goes into the hot shoe
would that help with the red eye? I'm not sure how the distance to
the subject affects things; it seems to me that the farther away they
are the more separation I need between the flash and lens; is this
true?

Any advice you can offer would be great; thanks.

"Rusty Wright" <rusty.TakeThisOut@socrates.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
news:uied6bxf8ic.fsf@socrates.Berkeley.EDU...
 > I'm just a hobbyist looking to shoot some indoor sports stuff;
 > wrestling, basketball, gymnastics, etc. I just took some pictures at
 > a wrestling match.
 >
 > I set my camera's ISO to 1600; it's a Canon 10D. The light was still
 > to low for decent shutter speeds so I used the camera's built in
 > flash. The lens I'm using is the Canon 28-135 zoom. It was usually
 > zoomed all the way out.
 >
 > Pretty much every picture has terrible red eye. At least any where
 > the eyes are visible at all, even ones where their head is facing
 > sideways.
 >
 > I'm wondering if I were to get a flash that goes into the hot shoe
 > would that help with the red eye? I'm not sure how the distance to
 > the subject affects things; it seems to me that the farther away they
 > are the more separation I need between the flash and lens; is this
 > true?
 >
 > Any advice you can offer would be great; thanks.

Not necessarily. Red eye is caused by your flash illuminating the back of
your subject's eyeball. If your flash is close to your lens than the area
of the eyeball lit by your flash is visible in the view of your lens. You
may have noticed that photographers who rely on flash pictures, like
paparazzi, have their flashes mounted on brackets to move them away from the
lens axis.<!-- ~MESSAGE_AFTER~ -->