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I originally owned a Tamron 28-300 lens that I used on my old maxxum film cameras. After many years of use, the zoom mechanism froze up (it has since worked its way loose). Still, I was in transit to the Far East on vacation and found a shop to sell me the Tamron 18-250 lens in LA. In the year and 3 months that I've owned it, I have shot over 5000 pictures with it in varied settings.
One of the problems with the 28-300 was the lack of wide angle that the 7d created with sensor crop. The crop factor on my 7d is 1.5 so the 18-250 is effectively becomes a 27-375 lens which makes it very useful in most travel photo situations. Obviously, my fixed lenses like a 90mm 2.8 are better for low light and a mirror lens has a longer zoom but for a general purpose lens, this is rather great.
There is some vignetting that occurs at the edges of some highly zoomed pictures but its seldom noticeable.
The thing is, I'm not a professional photographer, I don't spend an hour setting up a shot. I can't carry around 2-3 bodies with different lenses on them. When traveling, I give myself the best chance of getting the shot and that means being able go wide angle in one moment and zoom in tight the next. Can it possibly be blurry at 375? yes. However, if all I had was an 18-70, I might be so far away to not get the shot at all. I've learned how to shoot with this lens on the 7d and have had good success with it.
If I had the 12Mp Sony A700 (which I'm planning to get soon) being farther away wouldn't be such a big deal but with the 6.1MP 7D, digital zoom in Photoshop only goes so far without getting pixellated.
My hints for using this lens (and maxxum/alphas):
1. bracketing is your friend. I find that taking three shots of varying EV makes it more likely that one will be non-blurry, particularly at the long end of this lens.
2. Learn to watch the anti-shake sensor carefully and practice pushing the shutter release gently. Low light shots, even with low speed lenses are possible with practice. (see the 1/20th 160mm w/o a tripod of a Balinese dancer I uploaded as a customer image)
3. If in doubt, take the shot. Mb's are cheap, just discard if the shot isn't good.
So overall, I really like this lens for touring. There are some shots that you wouldn't want to take with it, such as portraits or action shots where you need to stop a baseball player in lower light. However, even with its limitations, it has found its way into my camera bag more often than not as of late.
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