Amami Superman Photography

I had some time off this afternoon and I haven't had some alone time with my wife recently so we went for a drive today listening to some good music and enjoying the scenery. It was a blazer today so we decided to head down south to a small city called Konia where they have a gelato shop. This shop has some pretty delicious flavors but my favorite is the watermelon smoothie they have. Kind of like coo coo for cocoa puffs...

OK, so this first photo isn't in Setouchi. It was taken on the way to Setouchi in Sumio. I wanted to take this photo because of how much green you can see. I heard some one say once that when God was making Amami, the only color He had left was green. This photo reminded me of that.



So our whole little excursion for today was to buy these, smoothies. The one on the left is watermelon and the one on the right is passion fruit. It's kind of a long way to drive just for some smoothies, but they're really good.



The name of this flavor was in Japanese katakana and I couldn't figure it out. I think it's "flambeaux", which it kind of resembles. If it is "flambeaux", I find that kind of funny because isn't gelato Italian? I'm not really sure what kind of fruit was used though. I'm pretty sure that it's some kind of berry flavor.



Kakeroma is the island just south of Amami. It's a pretty small island but it has plenty of secluded beaches you can go to to hang out for a day and snorkel. Usually to get to these beaches, you need to take a water taxi since most of them don't have road access.



In my last post, I posted a few photos of the clouds in the sky. I really liked them but they didn't turn out the way I expected them to. Today, I tried to take some more photos with the the sky as the subject. I think these turned a out a bit better but they're still not quite what I'm looking for. I think I'm going to have to get some gradient neutral density filters to get the desired effect I want. Today I only used a polarized filter. I'm still studying so I'm not sure what I need.



I think I would like to get a wide angle lens next. I'm not very fond of fisheye lenses but I would like to mess around with one if I had the chance. I don't know if it's just the above picture's clouds or what, but I like the very slight fisheye effect it has. Is that just an effect that occurs because this lens is slightly wide angle(76°)?



The palm looking plants on the side of this mountain are called "sotetsu" in Japanese. I don't know what they're called in English. Pretty much wherever you go in Amami, you can find these plants.



This photo was taken from the same vantage point as the previous but to the right side. Sotetsu are pretty robust plants as you can see in the above photo where they are growing on the side of a cliff.



My wife pointed out to me these flowers. I didn't see any others besides these. I haven't a clue what they're called.



Nishikomi is the most western village in Amami. I like to come out here sometimes just to see the people here. They are quick with a smile and are also quick to befriend you. This is one of the things I love about Amami. We didn't have much time to get out and spend some time here. There weren't very many people outside, probably because it was midday and it was pretty hot. If you were here around the evening time, there would be plenty of locals out shooting the breeze. That's the time to be here to mingle.



Most villages that are close to the beach have coral walls like this. I can imagine they built these well before I was born. This is another reason why I like to visit the outlying villages. It gives me a sense of a time when brick and concrete weren't ready and available. It makes me wonder how long it took to gather coral from the beach to build walls this big.





If you look at the right portion of this photo, in the distance you can see the islands just south of Kakeroma (the island just south of Amami). About the same direction, but further south, is Tokuno Island. I'm pretty sure you can't see it in this photo. Earlier this year I took some photos of the sunrise in the northern part of Amami and you can see in the distance Kikai Island. Tokuno Island is about twice as far as that so I doubt any of the islands you see in this photo is Tokuno Island.