'Taifun' no fun inTokyo

Day One. CCE Photo Tour to Japan. It's raining. In fact, it's pouring. There's a typhoon heading across Tokyo Bay for our hotel. Or so it seems.
What do you do when you are there to make great images of Japan and the weather is wet, wet, wet all the time?

Nippori hotel view

By the light of the pachinko parlour

I decided to go out into the rain, camera safely wrapped in the plastic bag I had pinched from the rubbish bin in my hotel room, to see if I could get any good reflection shots. I got wet, but I also got a couple of quite neat shots of neon lights reflected from the Pachinko parlour into the wet pavement.
TIP: A clear plastic bag was very useful because you can attach it round the lens (primarily) with a rubber band -  then carefully cut the plastic away from in front of the glass so that everything else on the camera is covered, except for the very front of the lens. Because the plastic is transparent, it's easy enough to see to operate the camera, either from the outside, or by sliding a hand into the back of the plastic bag. It looks odd, but it works.



Here's a short two-clip video of the rain shot using the Powershot SX30IS.  Another good helper is a monopod - this can add another one or two f-stops of added stability, which, when combined with Canon's 4.5 f-stop image stabilisation (IS), built into its Powershot SX30 IS, gave me enough to produce pictures that were reasonably sharp.

Yeah, whatever.....

Then, next day, the rain had stopped. I think the rain had exhausted itself overnight in Tokyo Bay. We went to the Meiji Shrine and then to Harajuku. More pictures shortly...