This is the second best lens I have ever owned. It offers amazing range and really nice, crisp images. I mainly use it for bird and wildlife photography. A note: when I first used it, I was very disappointed with the blurriness of the resulting images. This lens has built-in Sigma stabilization, which is really good, but you basically CANNOT use it with Sony's built-in camera stabilization (SteadyShot). You need to disable one of the two (which is very easy anyway). I find the Sigma's stabilization much better than the Sony's, but that blur still goes away. Also note that this lens is incredibly sharp at F11 - it's just the perfect spot. So if you shoot with aperture priority set to F11 and disable SteadyShot on your camera (if you have a Sony), you'll get amazingly beautiful shots.