Hi Rob, and welcome to the TDP Forums!


The EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS is certainly a great lens - but an expensive one. Although I have not personally used one, the Tamron 17-50mm lens that you mention is reportedly a very good 3rd party alternative. It does not have image stabilization (Tamron calls it vibration compensation, VC), but even though IS/VC does offer advantages for low-light shooting at those short focal lengths, it's much more useful for longer lenses (and IS does not help stop subject motion, only camera shake). There is a VC version of the Tamron 17-50mm, but reportedly that's not as good optically as the non-VC lens. One frequent contributor here, Jan (Sheiky) used the Tamron 17-50mm non-VC in the past and liked it.


For a decent indoor lens (this applies to indoor sports as well as your church shooting, depending on the venues), you need to be looking for a fast aperture. Sometimes f/2.8 is fast enough, but often not. Since zoom lenses only get as fast as f/2.8, that means looking at a prime. Fortunately, there are several good options that won't break the bank. The first thing to determine is what focal length you need - you mention a superzoom with a range up to 200mm, but that is often too long for indoor shots (and those lenses are way too slow anyway).


I'd recommend something like the Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 - excellent image quality, very fast focusing, and IMO one of the best values in the Canon lineup. It's probably a reasonable focal length for ringside shots, and also works wonderfully for outdoor portraits (you might need a 2- or 3-stop ND filter to get a really wife aperture in full daylight, tough, but 58mm filters are reasonably inexpensive). There's also the 100mm f/2 (close cousin to the 85mm f/1.8), and the 135mm f/2L (which is much more expensive). I think the key thing to determine is the focal length you need for ringside shots. Ask your brother what focal length(s) he uses for the kind of shooting you want to do. But, remember to divide the focal length he likes on his 5DII's by 1.6 - since your T1i and 60D use an APS-C sensor, there's a crop factor effect, such that if he uses a 135mm lens, you'd want an 85mm lens to achieve the same framing, etc. The other thing to keep in mind with focal length is that the 60D has a lot of pixels to work with - if your lens is a little short, you can crop a bit if needed, but if your lens is too long, sometimes you cannot back up.


Hope that helps...


--John