Birds of a feather

Spend any length of time in Japan, and you'll see crows. There are hardly any pigeons in all of Tokyo, but there are a few. These big crows rule the roost. Nets are thrown over the bags of rubbish in the mornings, (in a futile attempt) to stop the crows ripping open the bags before the collection people arrive. The crows are loud, and are not easily scared. In fact, I think that the local Japanese people are more scared of the crows than the crows are of them!

At first glance, they're evil looking black birds, but look closer and you'll see very clever animals, with feathers of a deep, midnight purple. I personally like the crows a lot, and will endeavour to take a close-up photo in the near future. Until then, I wanted to share this photo I took just before sunset, of two crows flying rather majestically across the autumn sky.

Dramatic Lighting

This time of year is like a second rainy season. The skies are often very dramatic, with water-laden clouds lining the horizon. If you're lucky, you may even see a rainbow or two. Soon, the skies will be clear in preparation for the amazing blue which characterises winter in Japan. I'm looking forward to that, but in the meantime, I will try to work with what I've got. 

I typically perform very subtle (if any) edits to my photos, as the direct camera output pleases me greatly. However, I had a little fun with the picture below, and slightly tweaked the tint in the sky for a bit more drama.

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Dramatic Skies | RX1 | 1/200s f/11.0 ISO100 35mm | Lightroom tweaks (clarity & tint)

It's finally stopped raining

I was greeted by this beautiful sky this morning when I opened the curtains, and just had to take a picture (can you count the crows?). After living in Manchester for seven years I tend not to complain about rainy weather so often (it's nicknamed "The Rainy City" for a reason). However, it's been raining almost non-stop since last Friday night, when huge thunderstorms and quite insane amounts of rain (think tropical deluge) hit Tokyo and followed me all the way to Kyoto, where it remained until around 5pm on Sunday. 

Constant rain doesn't make for a good city-break, but we tried our best to get around and see some sights in Kyoto over the weekend. I'll publish the photos throughout the week.

Political climate

There's politics in the air. Local elections are taking place all over Tokyo, which means that there are numerous posters and political campaigners with loudspeakers (more on that another time).

This poster caught my eye. The Prime minister is looking upwards, in the usual "thoughtful" pose, but the forming storm-clouds overhead created a nice analogy. Is he considering what to do about the ageing Japanese population? Immigration?  Or is he simply wondering which tie to wear next week?

Summer Storms

Summer is definitely here. For the last two days, the temperature in central Tokyo peaked somewhere over 35°C. North of Tokyo, in the mountains of Gunma-ken, 900 people were hospitalised and 2 died from heatstroke. It's rather hot, to say the least. It's also very humid (between 50% ~ 95% RH).

The strong sun easily burns, and it's not uncommon to see ladies with parasols. The heat causes the moist air to rise high, creating these magnificent cumulonimbus clouds. When I took this photo, we could already hear the thunder in the distance. Two hours later, the thunder was above us, and we endured another huge thunderstorm.