Busy...

Has been rather busy of late... why?

1 - Mia !

http://yogobear.blogspot.com/2008/09/this-is-mia.html

http://yogobear.blogspot.com/2008/09/mia-day-5.html

http://yogobear.blogspot.com/2008/10/some-more-photos-of-mia.html

So cool ;)

2 - Work

There was this little bit of a problem... Caused all sorts of fun and games. Maybe "meltdown" would be a better description? Oh well, bad for some (Lehman's... ouch), but not too bad for us. Have heard rumors that lots of those $20k per month apartments in Roppongi Hills are sitting vacant now that all the Lehman's crowd can't afford them, and apparently can be rented really cheap... may have to investigate that.

Besides those two? That's enough to keep you busy, but...

Have managed to take a couple of photos. I had to go into work late one night and decided to walk. It only takes about 35 minutes, and have been wanting to take some night photos for a while. I've uploaded a few of them to flickr, start here and work backwards... all taken hand held.

And I am still uploading photos reasonably regularly from my phone to here.

What else is going on? It's getting colder... there is snow starting to fall in the mountains! Mt. Fuji has some already - can see it from work on a clear day. We're already planning and booking snowboarding trips. Looks like this year will be Christmas in the snow! Cool.

Oh! you can buy fireworks in Japan...

At Toys'R'us. And they are cheap. This monster bag is only $50. If only I had somewhere to let them off...

I think I might have to "find" somewhere to let them off...

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.