Guys, I am sat in my hotel room in Sapporo Hokkaido Japan after my flight was canceled due to severe weather conditions (53 cm of snow in 24 hours) waiting until Wednesday (2 days) before I can head home, so I thought I would share with you some of my pictures from my trip. Our trip started in Tokyo for 3 days followed by Mt Fuji for two days then Hokkaido for the last 7 days. Hokkaido was the highlight of my trip so I will start there.
I wasn't sure how my X2D II and 3 x XCD lenses were going to hold up in the potential freezing conditions, but it did remarkably well, below is how I managed my gear;
1/. all gear was kept in the rear hatch of our rental car while out shooting
2/. When I saw something that I wanted to take a picture of I would park the car grab whichever lens I thought would work best for the composition and go and take the pictures
3/. after taking the pictures I would put the camera back in the camera backpack in the back of the car and keep driving until I saw something new to shoot
4/. I did this for 95% of the time, taking +/- 100 pictures a day using just one battery ( I had two spare batteries inside my jumper pocket keeping warm)
On one day at Otowa Bridge Kushiro (south east Hokkaido) I went to shoot the early morning sunrise with hopefully the red crowned cranes in the shot (unfortunately they weren't there) but I still got a nice picture of the river frosted trees and steam coming off the water. On that morning I arrived at Otowa Bridge at 5am (sunrise 7 am) I arrived that early from a tip on Youtube about this location and already the bridge had a row of 30 plus tripods set up waiting for the sunrise and it was minus 23 degrees. I grabbed my gear and went onto the bridge and found myself a spot into a 3 foot gap between two other tripods, I got some funny looks but being 6"3" nothing was actually said (we later chatted about this and that so it wasn't that bad,
The problem for me though was standing on that bridge tor 2 hours in -23 degrees, I would say the first hour was okay but after that even with all the top Columbia cold weather gear on I started to get cold. I initially had the X2D and 135:2.8 sitting on the tripod and when I stared seeing frost on the lens hood I took it off the tripod and put both camera and lens inside my jacket and kept it there until I actually stared using it around 06:30. I took about 40 pictures and the battery was now in the red, but more so I couldn't stand the cold anymore and left just after sunrise.
Anyway below are some of the pictures from my trip......enjoy
Neil
