Taken on vacation trips
What can a visit to New Zealand be without seeing sheep? According to one myth, New Zealand has 3 million people and 60 million sheep! Although this was true in the past, it was estimated that there were 40.1 million estimated resident sheep at 30 June 2006 (versus a human population of 4 million), giving a ratio of 10 sheep per person. I was lucky to catch this baby lamb looking for a drink of milk in a field along Milford Road.
The road from Queentown to Glenorchy in New Zealand has been described as “one of the most scenic drives you’ll ever experience”. The road runs along the edge of Lake Wakatipu, the third largest lake in New Zealand. The drive itself takes about 45 minutes although I must say that we took longer than that with all the stops for photography we made! 😛 The spectacular and surreal scenery we caught was certainly well worth the time spent!
Canon 40D technical report: One of the interesting features on the 40D that I like is the Highlight Tone Priority setting, which is supposed to expand the dynamic range for highlights, ideal especially for the scene above where exposure is critical to ensure that details are preserved in the bright clouds. I find that I get less blown highlights with this mode turned on although I have read that this is at the expense of more noise in the shadow areas. Definitely a good feature to have for landscape pictures!
We caught some spectacular displays from Mother Nature during our trip to New Zealand. This impressive display of clouds was taken at Lake Pukaki while on our way to Mount Cook Village (you can see Mount Cook in the background here). A polarizing filter helped to increase the overall saturation in the skies while the turquoise-blue of the lake was a result of natural glacial or rock flour. Dad has coincidentally an almost exact version of this same picture although we were using separate tripods and equipment!