Klondyke Road is a gravel road that runs from Port Waikato to Onewhero, about 12 miles. It looked interesting on the map, and it was a nice day so I took my camera and tripod and set off. Now my car is quite large and not 4WD. As I progressed along the road it became narrower and narrower. And the passing places became fewer and fewer. I was dreading meeting something coming the other way and having to reverse mile or two to the nearest one.

Not only does the road get narrow, it gets higher, and there are steep drops with no guardrails on the side. So I took thing really slowly. I found out later than the Rally of New Zealand (one of the WRC rounds) passes along this road. I could not imagine travelling along this road at high speed..

Somewhere along this road was this house. It sat alone on the top of a hill, with a magnificent view.

House on Klondyke Road (Click for full size)

This shot looks really good when printed (for some reason) and I have a framed copy on my wall.

I’d taken along my new camera, a Canon EOS 450D. I bought this with a two “kit” lenses, 18-55mm and 55-250mm, both IS (Image Stablised). This was a big step up from my Panasonic Lumix. I now felt like I had a real camera.

The things that set it apart from my previous camera were:

  1. Viewfinder. I could not see exactly what it was I was going to shoot. No more squinting at an LCD panel on the back of the camera.
  2. Proper autobracketing. I could now control the autobracketing with up to +/-2EV. Also it was possible to set a 2 second timer so you can press the shutter and the three shots are fired off after a 2 sec delay, ideal for ensuring no camera shake on the tripod.
  3. Image Stablisation that really worked. Although not so useful for tripod work, for regular shots this is great
  4. Less noise. The amount of noise at ISO1600 was comparable to the Panasonic’s noise at ISO100
  5. Ability to have background out of focus and get real “bokeh”. With the Panasonic it always seemed that everything was pretty much in focus. Not really true, but the out of focus parts were only slightly out of focus.
  6. Much better user interface. The Panasonic was really fiddly to set up to get what you wanted. It was almost like they expected their users to just shoot on auto the whole time. The Canon UI on the other hand was intended to be used.
  7. Just better picture quality. Sharper, better color, contrast.
  8. And finally, it looks very cool and makes the Pansonic look like a toy.

I had a lot of fun with the EOS 450D, shooting about 3000 images in the first month. Now all I had to do was learn to take decent pictures. This is proving to be quite hard.