Tokyo Bay Hanabi 2008

Last Sunday night was Tokyo Bay Hanabi. We had some friends over, we managed to get a dozen people into our apartment. Amazingly it wasn't to crowded. And we had pies.

Anyway this year I thought I would try something different for taking photos of the fireworks. Last year I was shooting with a wide angle lens and got some great pics of the whole scene. So this year I thought I would try shooting for some close up shots with my old 210mm zoom lens, things turned out pretty well...

I was pretty amazed at how well the old 210mm zoom worked out, it is around 15 years old after all. It doesn't have auto focus, but the *istDs could actually "talk" to it so I could control the aperture using the body, this amount of backwards compatibility really did amaze me.

Above is just a mosaic, but you can see the all the individual photos on flickr.

Welcome to the Dark Side...

I brought an iPhone. Damned Apple.

Anyway, I opened another flickr account to upload phone pics. I must admit it's very convenient to upload photos from the iPhone.

And in general it is a very damned cool toy, its just a shame you have to use iTunes, if only it had a decent piece of software on the computer side it would be so much better.

Now, time to post something else so this isn't the top post on my blog...

Stormy Weather...

On the NEX on Saturday afternoon, coming back from Narita we went through a really crazy little storm somewhere near Chiba. It was bright and sunny one moment... Then crazy amounts of thunder, you could hear it in the train, and lightning and rain... Then back to sunny again... All in the space of about twenty minutes.

 

Before...

During...

After...

 

Was quite an interesting train ride really, and I'm well impressed by how well these pictures came out, especially considering they are taken out the window of a moving train, using my mobile phone.

As a side note, it never ceases to amaze me how green and pretty Japan can be, this is just a random rice field out the window of the train, about 10 minutes from Narita airport.

Afternoon Tea With a View

This one is also from a couple of weeks ago. We went to Tokyo Dome, and ended up having afternoon tea in a bar / cafe thing on the top floor of the hotel there. Was a pretty impressive view, and some pretty tasty food.

Tokyo Dome is the big building on the left, the amusement park is part of the greater Tokyo Dome attractions, this shot is looking vaguely north towards the outlying parts of Tokyo, not that you can tell, a Tokyo seems to go on forever!

Somethings from Kawaguchiko

We went to Kawaguchiko a couple of weeks ago while a friend was visiting, was pretty cloudy the whole time, so only saw a few glimpses of Mt Fuji, but was still a good weekend away. And we saw a really stretched vehicle... and a lady on a fish... click to see full size.

A Mango, A Bridge and a Crane.

Like the title says...

A mango, an expensive mango. A $157 mango.

And on a completely different subject, a damn big crane. Have been wondering all week about what the thing was parked over the other side of the bay, it looked like a large piece of roadway on a barge. Turns out that's exactly what it is. It is part of a new bridge, and this huge crane is going to lift it into place. To give some scale, the little boat in the foreground is actually a ferry, not a small ferry either, if you look closely you can see quite a lot of people standing on it's roof.

Some random photos from the weekend...

Lately, at the end of a nice clear spring day, the view from our apartment has been pretty nice. The sun gets reflected back off the buildings on the other side of the bay. Finally managed to grab a photo, it isn't the best, had to push the ISO to 3200, so its pretty grainy...

This is 4 shots glued together, the end result isn't to bad.

And on a completely different subject...

For the last few weeks there has been fire boats in the bay doing strange, choreographed, well, something. Including using the funky water cannons. Interesting.

Anyway's, on Saturday it became obvious why. They were rehearsing for some demonstration of fire boat goodness.

Including shooting fluorescent colored water from their water cannons. Didn't quite grab the camera quickly enough, but managed to catch the tail end of the spray.

Mmm, technicolor...