I’m in Hamburg relaxing a bit with friends and my brother. It feels good after so many months of Tokyo, Tokyo and Tokyo

I took this picture using my new 10-20mm Sigma lens. I envy this dog, I’ll try to imitate him these days.

I found this Stephen Wiltshire video in my Youtube favorites. Stephen was born with autism, and he could not learn how to speak until he was 9 years old. But he realized that he had a great special ability, he could memorize complicated things just by looking at them. He can just look from an skyscraper window during some minutes and the made a drawing with all kinds of details. One of the things he does is to visit cities by helicopter, look at them during one hour and then draw everything he saw. Madrid, Rome, London, New York and Hong Kong were pretty easy for him, so he tried with Tokyo. And yes, he could, but it took him one week to finish the panoramic 360 degrees drawing made from what he saw from a helicopter fly and some observations from Roppongi Hills.

Highres drawing can be found here.

I realized that the Yoyogi park area is not very accurate, but still impressive!

More sign pictures in my flickr set.

Last weeks I’ve been watching How I met your mother, it’s really fun and at the same time it teaches you many life lessons. What I like the most are the really different character personalities, even though all the main characters are all radically different they are very good friends and they are always doing crazy stuff.

Wait for it!

Kapibara-san is a character created by Banpresto. At the beginning you could only get a Kapibara-san from toy crane vending machines. But people wanted it so much that they started selling it everywhere, different sizes, different colors, T-shirts, books and all kinds of merchandising. It is interesting how they managed to create a phenomenon just from a boring and simple animal (A capybara). The point is that it is really “kawai” (cute), and Japanese love “kawai” stuff. I like it!

I was walking with Danny the other day and we found this interesting sign:

It says that you shouldn’t leave your dog’s shit on the street. Generally Japanese people follow the rules (That’s good for some things, but not so good for other things), in this case is good because it’s very difficult to bump in to a dog shit while you walk. In Spain, where I come from the streets look like mined areas, and you have to walk always looking down if you don’t want to have an nasty accident.

Other posts about shit:

• Learn how to pee and poo with Shimajiro
• The shit building
• Pick up your dog’s shit 2
• The shit vending machine

Willcom, the company that made the W-ZERO3, just launched a new super-telephone-pda-smartphone or UMPC (Ultra-Mobile PC) or whatever you want to call it, and it works with Windows Vista! In Microsoft they must be very happy to see how someone has bothered to do so, and has managed to do it! But if you see the machine specs, then you understand that it is not so miraculous: Centrino 1.33GHz, 1Gb DDR2, 40Gb Ultra ATA, 5 inches TFT. It will probably become one one of the gadgets of the year in Japan, it costs 40.000 yen (400$) and you can connect to the Internet using PHS.

Japan is a paradise for all of us who enjoy taking pictures. All the major camera brands are Japanese, that’s good because prices for lens and cameras are much lower here than in other places. Furthermore, Japanese people in general like photography a lot, and that’s good for the market. You can find zillions of specialized shops, second hand cameras shops and there are even huge shops filling medium size buildings only with cameras. My advice is, go to Akihabara and compare the prices in different shops, sometimes the difference is pretty big. The cheapest shops are usually in the little streets (not in the main Akihabara avenue). Here are some pictures I took in Yodobashi (A good place to look stuff, they have almost all new models), and also pictures inside Mapcamera, a shop with all kind of old lenses and cameras, even from 50 years ago.

D60 a gogo

Canon area

Compact cameras

More compact

Canon EOS

Sigma

Pentax

Sony Alpha

S5 Pro

D300 panel

Canon EOS Digital

Canon and Nikon

There are many Hasselblad and Leica in there

Only Leicas

More Leicas

Did you notice the “?” in the price? That means that depending on the day and your skills to negotiate the final price than vary a lot.

More interrogation marks.

And more

The entrance to the forth floor in a building with five floors, all full of photography goodies. Mapcamera.

I love that you can test lenses and cameras all you want before buying. I took this picture using a 10mm lenses from the shop. I did not buying but I’m thinking to do it.

Yes, I know this is an old picture, it’s an “Internet Classic”, but still, I love it. Look at the shadow, it looks like Mount Fuji is using an umbrella.

Found this picture at Onigiri Tumblr

This is a lenticular cloud, it’s a type of cloud that is formed only under really rare conditions. It seems that they can form on top of very tall mountains where the difference of temperatures between the top and the base is very high. The temperature difference creates a continuous and symmetrical (in all directions) air flow that facilitates the formation of the cloud with an elliptical form. This type of clouds are usually used for OVNI pictures.

More lenticular picturesin this web.