Amami Superman Photography

We had nearly 60 children participate in this year's Halloween parade. We were still missing a few of them in this photo but by the time we got underway, they showed up and we were off trick-or-treating. During this photo, most of the parents are standing on the other side of the street where I am. It is a bit hard herding children through the downtown streets of Amami, but the parents were quite helpful this year and things went relatively smooth.



We first practice by going to my mother-in-law's store and my brother-in-law's store. I try to make sure that they are enthusiastic about what they're doing so they yell "trick or treat" as loud as they can and to also say "thank you" when they receive their candy. Then we move across the street and start the actual trick-or-treating.



The first shop we hit up is Eco Support Amami. E.S.A. is ran by a family friend Takayuki Yoshikawa. He sells solar panels for residential homes. His wife, Yuuko, is a personality at the local radio station, D-WAVE 77.7FM, and speaks English very well.



We then move right next door to a optical store called Tahara Megane. "Megane" means "glasses" in Japanese.

When we first started our trick-or-treat parade years ago, we used to buy all the candy and divvy it out to all the different stores we were going to visit. The downtown part of Amami where all the shops and stores are have a thing called "torikai" (A torikai is a sort of group the local store owners on a particular street make to help with find ways to stimulate their businesses). The torikai hold festivals on these streets 3 or 4 times a year and they asked us to do our trick-or-treat parade on the day they hold their autumn festival. That means they provide the candy, but we don't get to choose the stores we get to visit. This was OK with us so we have been correlating with the torikai when we do our trick-or-treat parade for that past few years. It works out for all of us. Since it's a festival and we're walking down the middle of it, everyone wants to know what we're doing and how they can join us next time. It's a great way to promote our business.


Some kids have really awesome costumes, but they're not the most easiest costumes to get around in.



As I mentioned before, we don't get to chose which stores and shops we visit. This year we got to visit a lingerie shop. I kind of blushed we came to this shop.



We then made our way to around 20 shops or so. The kids collected quite a bit of candy and after almost 2 hours, we were almost home. At the very end, we made our way down the indoor arcade they have near the post office. It was pretty cool looking back at all the people from our group walking down it.

I said at the first of this post that things went relatively smooth and they did, but it still takes a lot out of you. I have a pretty audible voice, but making sure everyone could hear me took it's toll. The day after, because my voice was so gone, everyone asked me if I had a cold.

Every year we hold a trick-or-treat party/parade for our students.   We always put some wall decorations together for a background and took commemorative photos of all the kids and their costumes.  Every year I tried to make the background better and better and tried to make the photos look a little more nice.  Here is a photo we took in 2006 for Halloween of our daughter Jade.  As you can see, there's not much to what we did for a background.

My 24" Intel Core Duo iMac's hard disk died on me the Friday before last. Luckily it is still under warranty so I was able to send it in the following Monday for repairs and it was back to me in no time. They even upped my disk capacity from 250GB to 320GB... BONUS! I've been up to my ears with preparations for our Halloween parade this Saturday so I haven't had that much time to reinstall all my applications. I installed and updated Adobe CS3 yesterday and finally got Lightroom 2 installed and updated today.

Last week on Wednesday I went for a drive with my wife and we decided to go check out a new wind turbine they're building here in Amami.

Just a small post for today. My computer went hay-wire last week and I had to send it in yesterday for repairs. I'm on an older computer at the moment writing this. I didn't have Lightroom or any other photo editing program installed on this computer so it took me a bit to get it in order to be able to use.

Yesterday was a spur-of-the-moment type deal. I was just finishing with work and it was a pretty nice day so I hopped in the car and drove to a nearby spot you could overlook the city. I got plenty of nice shots of the actual sun just as it was going down over the mountains but I liked this one the best.

After the sun went down and I started to take shots with longer shutters speeds of a few seconds, 2 older gentlemen with DSLR's and compact digital cameras drove up in a rental car and came up to right were I was shooting and starting taking photos. At first I thought they were photography enthusiasts like me but I soon realized they were just some tourists with nice cameras. Not saying photography enthusiasts can't be tourists or vice versa, but these guys were just plain rude with their photography.

I was taking photos with shutter speeds over 10 seconds when one of them came up and started to check out my camera while I was still mid shot. I explained to him I was in the middle of a shot and he apologized. After a few more shots, they started to take their own photos. It started to get really annoying when they started to use their flashes and moving in front of my camera to get their shots.

I'm not the most patient guy, but I bit my lip until they left. As soon as they drove off and I was sure they couldn't hear me, I said a few words that I wouldn't want my daughter to hear me say about them.

In the end, I got some shots that I like so it really wasn't that bad. I think I'll try to go take some sunrise photos sometime soon now the sun comes up later in the morning.

Last week on Sunday was Jade's field day. I made a previous post called 120% of some 4th grade boys running their race. Today I thought I would post Jade's.

Being a typical father, I tend to really get enthusiastic about things like this. After getting home and looking over the shots I took, I noticed that the ones of Jade weren't really that good. A lot of the shots were out of focus or the framing was terrible. The only thing I can think of for why I wasn't focused enough was I probably was cheering too hard to do any better.

Jade, my daughter, is the girl smiling big in the center of the above photo.

The weather reports the previous day called for a 60% chance of rain. In the morning it wasn't raining but it was very overcast. With the weather threatening to rain, I was afraid I would get caught out in it with my camera. It's difficult to hold an umbrella while taking photos and having people crowd you as you do. Everyone wants the best spot to take photos and they'll push and shove to get it. Sometimes finding a spot is difficult without being rude.



The above photo was taken from the second floor near Jade's classroom. I was surprised to see that hardly anyone had shown up yet. Usually it's packed by this time with people trying to find a good spot to set up video cameras and whatnot.

Last year Jade took 2nd place in an 800 meter race for the 1st grade girls. She took 1st place in all her field day races last year, but this year was a different story.

During these races they divide the children up into groups separating them from slowest to fastest to give a fair chance to everyone. Since Jade is one of the fastest girls in the 2nd grade, she had to run the very last heat with the other fastest girls.













She ran a good race and took 3rd. Although she didn't take 1st place, I was still very proud of her. She also ran anchor position for the class relay and destroyed the other classes taking 1st place for her team. I'm sorry to say that after these shots it started to rain so I put my camera away for the most part. I wasn't able to take any photos of her relay race. I did take some photos after this but they're pretty random and I'll post them in a different post.

I mentioned in a previous post about finding some waterfalls that were a bit hard to get to. Yesterday I went to one of those waterfalls and tried to take some photos. On the way to the waterfalls, we drove by a stand of ceder trees. I thought it would be a cool spot to take some shots so I stopped.

So as I was walking around looking up and taking photos, I almost walked right into this 8 legged monster. I'm not sure what they call these spiders here in Amami. They can grow to be very large. I've seen them with leg spans bigger than my open palm hand.




So after dodging spiderwebs and whatnot, I made it back to the car and we continued down the road. My wife doesn't usually come with me when I go out to take nature shots. I knew the spot I was going to was bit dangerous and I could fall and injure myself so I asked her to come along just in case.

Below is a shot from the road. I don't know how well you can tell how steep it is but let me reassure you, it was steep. There was no way I was going to get down there and back up without a good climbing rope. Fortunately, I came prepared with everything I needed. After securely tying the rope to a tree and securing my camera bag and tripod to my body, I inched my way down the mountain side. I have to admit, it was a bit of work getting down there. I was afraid I might have a harder time getting back up. Newspaper headlines flashed through my mind, "Japan Coast Guard Helicopter Called in to Save Fat Man on Cliff" Wonderful! When I got down as far as I could go, I found that the view wasn't that great and there wasn't much of a spot to set up my tripod properly. I was still a good 5 or 6 meters from the bottom but it was nearly impossible for me to get any further and still make it back up.




I did my best to get set up and do to a lot of wind, this was the best shot I got.




It was much to windy to get a shot off without getting any motion blur in the trees and bushes. When I finished and got all my stuff together for the climb up, I sat there and looked up to where my wife was standing and I was thinking, "She's going to have to go for help." To my complete and utter surprise, the climb up was no where near as difficult as the climb down. I think I did it in half the time.

On the way home I thought I would try some thing I've never done before. Take a photo from a moving car. I set the shutter speed to 1/20 sec and stuck my camera out the window and started to shoot on the straightaways.




The above photo is cropped a bit. I thought it was kind of nice. It was something I've never tried before and it turned out better than I thought it would.

So those were some of the photos I took yesterday. Now I'm going to go stretch out my sore muscles.

Last week while my wife's younger brother was visiting, we went out to a friend's skateboarding bowl. I used to fool around skateboarding many years ago but since then I haven't even touched a board. They had a small half-pipe in the back that I thought I would try my luck on. I've put on quite the weight over the years so I really didn't know how much trouble I was going to get myself into. It took a few drop-ins and wipes to finally get a kind of rhythm back. After messing around on that for a bit I thought I would try my luck on the much larger bowl they had. Needless to say, it only took one drop in and one wipe to call it a night. So then I got my camera out and started to take some photos of everyone else.

At first I tried to use my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens but it didn't have a wide enough angle. I switched to my Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 for the wider angle but it wasn't fast enough so I decided to use my built in flash. I've only used my built in flash a hand full of times and only a few shots when I did. This was the first time I used my flash to take around 100 shots.