Sports Photography for a beginner

[table1349]

I am totally confused :meh:
I'm assuming that the 20-200 is actually the 70-200?
Does Sigma calibrate their lenses too? (the front/back-focusing problem was on the Sigma)

L lens sounds really tempting though. But then.. it's also.. very eye catching. And I'm not sure if that's a good thing.. Though it does look very nice

I think the max ISO I can go up to is 800 (It's a Canon 10d remember) Maybe 1600 if the prints are smaller...

Yeah, it I meant the 70-200. My fingers sometimes are dyslexic. All good lens makers, (Sigma is one of them) will work on their lenses including re-calibrating the lens. My point was straight out of the box even a top of the line L lens can be a touch out of calibration. The reason that I sent the body was to have them calibrated together. It can be that a body is slightly out of calibration. The way to get them dead on is to send both the body and lens.

With your ISO limitation fast glass becomes even more important. When shooting inside the difference in one whole stop , f2.8-f4, can be tremendous. Jacqug's photo, a photo that nicely captures the action I will add, was shot at 1/100th of a second at f 5.0. At 1/250th it could have frozen the base runner as well and cleaned up a lot of the motion blur.