Richard: I am a relative newbie and needed a lens combo to shoot a poms competition in an indoor gym. This lense delivered one incredible shot after another. I shot it hand held mounted on my rebel t2i. I am a big guy and towards the end of the routine I was getting tired. I shot 980 pictures in about 8 minutes. Of those there were maybe 10 that were blurred/out of focus. All the rest were pin point accurate. I have shot numerous poms competitions before and the best lense I had was the USM 2.8 70/200 . This lense blew that one right out of the water. I shot mostly TV mode where I set the speed to the fastest speed that held the F Stop at or near 2. ISO was either 800 or 1600. Ofcourse now that I am writing this and I have gone thru all the pictures, I am realizing I should have let that F stop get bigger and shot at a faster speed, I probably would have gotten a wider range of different types of pictures. the Bokeh on most of my shots is great, because I was focusing on keeping the F stop low, (but thinking about it now I was a bit fanatic about that and it was probably a mistake). Next time out I will mess with both types, keeping the F low for some specific girl focusing and some with a bigger f stop and a higher speed where the range of focus is deeper. Its a great lense and I understand why it costs what it does.