Typhoon number 4 at Asakusa

“Typhoon” etymological origin is not clear, some say it comes from the Greek τυφων (typhon) meaning “whirlwind” and others say it comes from the Chinese táifēng 大風 (大 huge, big, 風 winds).

In Japanese, the word comes from Chinese but the way it is written changes a little bit. Taifuu is written as 台風 in Japanese, where the first kanji 台 is a simplification of 颱 that means typhoon itself and it is composed by 風 wind and 台 that means pedestal. I image pedestals on top of the wind to remember how taifuu 台風 is written and also the 颱風 version.

Every year the Japanese Meteorolgical Agency counts each taifuu 台風 hitting the Japanese territories numerating them starting with 1号. The most violent ones also get a name. This week, on Tuesday taifuu 4号 crossed Japan.

I checked and it was not hitting the Tokyo area directly, I did not considered it too dangerous and went to take pictures to Asakusa. The atmosphere was perfect to take pictures with my 50mm f1.2 and the abundant roofs at Asakusa’s streets allowed us to shoot pictures of rain without getting completely soaked.

I’ve been go Asakusa many times during the years but there is always so much people moving around that it makes it difficult to focus your mind on taking good pictures. Going at night and during a Typhoon was a great idea Carlos had and helped us to capture a different view of what we have always thought of Asakusa, the typical tourist destination in Tokyo. Although the Tokyo Sky Tree can now be seen from Asakusa adding por possibilities to the pictures that you can take from the Sensoji temple, this time it was raining so hard that we could barely see it.

I created a video using iMovie. I love how easy it is to put pictures together in a video using iMovie. For picture retouching I used Lightroom 4 using mainly the tone curve and temperature controls. The pictures where taken at f1.2 or f2 and ISO1600 or ISO2000 allowing me to move in a range of exposure times between 1/80 to 1/2000 depending on the situation, I made the decision mainly depending on how I wanted the rain drops to look like, what I wanted to have on focus and the available light in the scene. I had lots of fun playing with different exposure times to learn about the different “feeling” I can get depending on how I “freeze” the rain drops.

This is the result:

I uploaded it in HD, so full screen looks gorgeous! I used the music “Rain” by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

I uploaded full resolution pictures to my flickr (Around 40 megabytes each!).