[Rerun]

Stopped by Saneal Camera last night to look at some lenses. Tried out the 200mm zoom and the 300mm zoom. The 200mm was definitely lighter and shorter than the 300. I definitely liked the zoom capability of the 300 but it felt cumbersome to me (felt heavy mounted on the camera due to its length). Not sure I would want to be lugging it around on my camera as an everyday type indoor/outdoors lens.

Reading all the advice here, has made me start leaning towards the 50mm f/1.8 as a low light indoor lens and the 18-200 f/3.5-5.6 as an all-around everyday type lens which could also be used indoors if lighting conditions permit (can't be any worse than the 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 that I have now and use indoors... might even be better since I'll be able to zoom in on subject that are further away and won't have to use the computer program to edit and zoom in on far away subjects).

If I go this way, not sure what I'll do with the 18-55mm lens that I have now... I assume that it'll probably get stuffed into a drawer and never used again.

In the meantime, I'll try the suggestion of bumping up my ISO to 400 for those poor light indoor shots where its not practicle to use a flash. I wish I had thought of that when I was in Lethbridge at a dog show in November. It was in an arena and the lighting was the sh*tz. I had my camera on auto and the pics turned out awfull. The camera defaulted to a shutter speed of about 1/60 and pics were blurry (was taking pics of running dogs) and the pics were dark too.... all around just plain crappy.

Edit: Just reviewed some of the pics I took on auto... ISO in a lot of cases was set automatically to 3200 due to the poor light conditions. Focal length was 45-55mm and shutter speed defaulted to 1/60. F stop was 5.3 to 5.6