andiwm2003 said:
what exactly is you setup and how much did it cost? i'm in the market as well (although purely for fun, nothing professional at all).
My passion is shooting subjects that no one really sees, either due to the angle, or more often by freezing fast action.
I live in a tourist town that offers only about 20 different sports, and people come from all over the world. Money there is easier to make if you have a nice camera and a fast tele

I also enjoy birding, and want to capture that, especially hummingbirds.
However coming from a fuji s5000 that had a 30-300mm equiv lens on the front of it I also wanted to experience the wide angels, and see what that was about.
My budget was about $1600, and at first I was thinking of getting the 20D, dropping the kit lens and buying only the body for about $1000 and splitting the remaining $600 between a decent wide angle and a cheap tele. However the guys at Dpreview convinced me that for what I wanted, I should spend my money on a nice tele, that the cheap tele lenses really were just that, cheap. They also, while not being fond of the kit lens, said it would suffice.
With the kit lens only adding like $80 to the price tag (retailing like $100) I decided to go with that, and get a 70-200 f/4.0 L.
So from Adorama.com I picked up a refurb 20D with a kit lens ($999) and a 70-200 ($540), CF card and extra battery and only BARELY broke my budget.
I tell you, with complete honesty, that I could not be happier with my choice. The kit lens is perfectly fine for what I do, and serves me very well. I still push the limits of the 70-200, both in distance and in focus speed. Sometimes it doesn't keep up with me, but I couldn't imagine using anything that was slow. I'd have missed 80% of the good pictures I have, without a doubt.
The 20D with the 70-200 f/4L outperforms my fuji 30-300 by a mile, offering pictures easily twice as good, even if you crop the 20D pictures so they are of equal size. It has amazing "digital zoom"
I'm happy enough with this that my next purchase won't be a wide angle lens, but a 1.4 extender and a 50mm f/1.8 prime. After that an external flash, and down the road (years) I'll pick up an off brand really nice wide angle that goes down to 2.8.
The 20D and 70-200 is light as a feather, and I can hand hold it for hours on end. I beefed up though using the college's D70 with a Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR (Vibration Reduction, same as Canons IS). OMG what a monster!!
So as spoiled as I already was, I am quite happy with the Canon 70-200, and for a $540 lens it focuses just as fast the $2200 Nikkor!
Any other info, experience, or pictures I can offer to anyone please ask away or PM me.
Cheers,
Tyler