Amami Superman Photography

Yakeuchi Classic is a bicycle race they hold every year in Uken here on Amami. I have quite a few friends who like to cycle so I thought I would go take some photos of them.

I'm not sure how many entries they had but it wasn't a very big race. I want to say around 30 entries.

They started in Uken Town at a place called Ashiken. Ashiken happens to be the place my wife's grandfather is from. From Ashiken they go along the ocean until they reach Uken. Uken is where Uken Town got its name. From there they make an abrupt right turn and start their tedious climb into the mountains. Once they reach the top, it's all downhill from there. After a short bit, they take a right onto the road they started from and follow it all the way to where the start and goal is. They ride this course two laps for the race. Here is a Google Earth image you can see.

From this point on it was up hill. I took a few of these before moving onto the next spot. You can't see very well from the angle I was shooting from how steep the grade was for this hill. It was long and steep.




Although this mountain is a killer to climb, I'm glad some found the strength to smile, and even pose, for the camera.









I found it pretty difficult to take photos of a fast moving object and have it look nice. I could take the photos with a fast shutter speed but then I wouldn't have any motion blur to give a feel of speed. On the other hand, if the shutter speed was too slow, I would get terrible motion blur throughout the whole photo. I fiddled with the settings until I finally found a somewhat OK setting.


















At the end of the race before everyone was ready to leave, they asked me to take a group photo for them.

I took around 250 photos this morning of the race. I threw some out just because they were terrible. I saved the ones I kept to a disc and I'm off to give it to them. They're having their "Uchiage" tonight. Uchiage is kind of like an after party thing.