It was the Battle Royale of a lacrosse event! 3 teams and 6 games! It was a scrimmage game where each team played each other 3 times. It was a heck of display and these guys were worn out! But the main exercise was to see how the Sigma 70-200mm lens would work. The lens and I were already on shaky terms since the circular polarizer debacle of a few months ago. With that gone, it was now time to really see if this lens would pull out some great sports shot. After all, that's why I bought the thing in the first place. Now it was time to see what it could really do.

So with a fully charged set of batteries I stood on the sidelines and fired away. And fired. And fired. And fired some more just for good measure. The batteries didn't even break a sweat, but the memory card was filling fast. So fast, that with 30 minutes left for the final game, I was down to only 30 shots. Note to self: Buy more memory cards.

I timed my shots more carefully, but ended up finishing off the last few in short order. There was lots of action and plenty of things to focus on. I had the camera on a monopod (thank heaven, the games lasted 3 hours!) and everything worked perfectly. The lens was quick to focus, followed the action extremely well and I blasted through 550+ shots. Note to self: Buy a big memory card!

I had the camera in shutter priority at 1/1000 sec. The aperture ranged from f/5 - f/8 so I had plenty of room to work and plenty of light. Here are just a few shots to show what the lens and camera can do. I have to admit this is a great lens and it has excellent range on it. There are a lot more pictures that are keepers than those shown here, but I just wanted to show off a sampling.

Canon Rebel XTI with Sigma 70-200mm lens.