I've been meaning to write about and recommend the 16" FotoSharp Camera Rain Cover I picked up last summer. It's a remarkably simple little cover that scrunches up into a tiny ball in my camera bag when not in use, yet provides rain protection even with my big Nikkor 70-200 VR zoom on my D200.

The pictures on its web site pretty much show what it is, especially the 3rd one that shows it laid out flat (on top of a book, to show its transparency). It's a tube with a smallish opening on one end that goes over the lens, and a big opening on the other for you to get at the camera. The size I got cost about $30, which is perhaps a bit pricy when you look at the materials, but less so when you look at the labor and the convenience of having it delivered to your door ready to use.

I decided that I needed something like this last spring, after my rainy day trying to take pictures at one of Kyoto's more picturesque temples. I'm sure that I presented a comical sight trying to balance a big blue umbrella over myself and my camera while trying to get a picture of a fern or something. After a while, I started to realize that the huge blue umbrella (the same one seen in this post of Anthony dancing) was casting a blue light on my closeups. Ugh.

So, I got one of these FotoSharp rain covers (FotoSharp calls it a “RainCoat”) and I was very pleased. Its great combination of portability and effectiveness make it a no-brainer to always have on hand in my camera bag.

I've used it a few times, most recently when it started to sprinkle at the shrine closing ceremony I posted about last month. I've also used it as padding between items in my camera bag, to provide some measure of shade for the camera/lens on a hot day, and as a flash diffuser for impromptu close-up macro work.

The ordering process is a bit unorthodox in this modern day: you tell them what you want, they send it, if you like it, you send a check. If not, you send it back. It's got a wonderful Mom & Pop feel to it that's rare these days.

I was so happy with the one I got that I immediately ordered two more, to take back with me to Japan as gifts.

They have other styles and sizes, for all kinds of needs.

In Summary: FotoSharp RainCoat: highly recommended.

Adding to my stable of export plugins for Lightroom (Zenfolio, Smugmug and Flickr), I've just released my “Export to Picasa Web” Plugin for Lightroom.

I just hacked it out and it's received minimal testing by me (and no testing by anyone else), so version churn is likely at first as bugs are reported and shaken out. It comes with a French translation for all the parts that are the same as the other plugins, but the texts unique to this plugin remain in English until the French translator is able to send an update.

(If you're one of the unlucky few to get the dreaded “FormatW” error, you have my sympathies, but please don't report it to me because there's nothing I can do about it at this point.)

You can download the plugin from this page.

Mizuki and Anthony
Drawing by Anthony (five years two months)
(used without permission, but if he sues me, I'll put him to bed without supper)

Anthony drew the picture above as a present for one of the girls in his class, Mizuki-chan. She came over for a visit on Friday and forgot one of her toys, so he's including the drawing along with the toy when he returns it to her tomorrow.

He drew the picture below last week, at my request for a drawing that we could include on our Christmas / New Year's cards. I didn't request any specific content, but he naturally knew to draw a family picture...

Mommy, Anthony, (George), and Daddy

It was nice that he even included Curious George, a constant companion he received as a present from my coworkers at Yahoo! Finance just prior to his birth.

Anthony has many strong points, but drawing has never been one of them. At five years, two months old, many of his classmates have more developed drawing skills, but as you'd expect from parents, we're plenty enamored with what he produces just as it is.

You can certainly see the progress over time, comparing these with something from when he was almost three years old, and a couple of items from a year ago: family drawings and attention to biological detail. This week's drawings are even a big jump from what he was doing three months ago.

Another area where Anthony is perhaps a bit behind his peers is in reading and writing. The reason, of course, is that he's got two languages to deal with (and his speaking and listening are quite bilingual), so today when he wrote his name all by himself without any prompting or example to copy from, there was much joy all around.

This writing was in the fog on the mirror above the bathtub, while having a bath with Mommy. When he got out of the bath, he wanted to write more, so I got paper and pen and he drew this:

Sleeping

The top characters (あんと) are his name in Japanese (“anto”). He then drew a picture of the family sleeping, and tried to write his name again beside his head. He apparently made a mistake with the last letter, because he then wrote that above, converting the mistake into a trash can sitting on the floor beside the sleeping Daddy (where there is really a trash can).

His attempt to cover up the mistake reminds me of when I was in third grade and was drawing a Mother's Day card, I must have been daydreaming because I wrote “FROM JEEF”. Realizing my mistake, I drew a sun such that one of the sunbeams covered the bottom of the second “E”, converting the phrase to the proper “FROM JEFF”. I did this with sufficient skill that no one would ever be able to notice, yet, quite oddly, from about that time my siblings sometimes took to calling me “JEEF”, a mistake that they still occasionally make to this day. Go figure.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/20 sec, f/2.8, ISO 500 — map & image data — nearby photos
Port of Takamatsu
30 Minutes Before Sunrise

Fumie and I made an overnight trip to the city of Takamatsu, in Kagawa Prefecture, on the large island of Shikoku, Japan, to see pop singer Kousuke Atari (中孝介) in concert. Just as I did the last time we made an overnight trip (which was also to see Kousuke Atari in concert, at a shrine in Miyajima), I awoke early to see what photo opportunities there might be in the early of morning.

Unlike Miyajima and our extended time there, which produced so many nice (or story-telling) pictures that I had to make a Miyajima category on my blog, we were in Takamatsu for only a short time, and, unfortunately, were able to enjoy almost nothing of the area. Our hotel was right downtown at the port, which made for a very industrial – but still pretty – sunrise.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 70mm — ¹/640 sec, f/5, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Industrial Sunrise
Three Minutes Before Sunrise

The Ferris wheel at left is, apparently, the “only Ferris wheel in the world on top of a book store” (the book store, apparently, being the largest in all of Japan). As Zak notes, Japanese people seem to have a thing for Ferris wheels. I've even had a Ferris wheel on my blog before, on a Rice Terraces post.

On the four-hour drive the previous evening, we stopped by a highway rest area that had “the world's only highway-rest-area Ferris wheel.” We actually rode it, enjoying the views of the nearby Akashi Straights Bridge that we'd just crossed, the world's longest suspension bridge (a mile and a quarter between the two piers, almost two and a half miles total). Alas, we didn't have time for the bookstore Ferris wheel this trip.

Just as with the Orange Sunset in Kyoto that I posted the other day, I used the zoom to try to isolate the color...

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 @ 200mm — ¹/1000 sec, f/7.1, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
Orange Sunrise in Takamatsu

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 17mm — ¹/750 sec, f/7.1, ISO 640 — map & image data — nearby photos
The Moment of Sunrise

Takamatsu is on the northern coast of Shikoku, an island a bit smaller than new Jersey. I got these pictures with water to the east by walking out to the end of a breakwater sticking half a mile out into the ocean.

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 20mm — ¹/1000 sec, f/6.3, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
10 Minutes Later

Twenty minutes later it was as bright as daytime (because it was daytime ), but the shadows were still, of course, quite long. Back at the land-side of the breakwater, I had to work to keep the shadow of this guy and his bicycle in frame....

Nikon D200 + Nikkor 17-55 f/2.8 @ 38mm — ¹/500 sec, f/4.5, ISO 320 — map & image data — nearby photos
Long Shadows in the Morning