Amami Superman Photography

My daughter Jade's got a skateboard for her birthday from my wife's younger brother last May. Several times a week she goes out and practices but we haven't really taken her somewhere where other skateboarders are riding. Every month on the 3rd Sunday, the local skateboarders get together and have a sort of skateboarding school. Anyone can come so we thought it would be fun for Jade to go and see some real skateboarders.



In my youth, I was into skateboarding a bit. Although I was never any good, my younger brother Dan always stuck with it and is a pretty talented skateboarder. I try to give my daughter some tips, but I haven't touched a board in well over 15 years so I let the more experienced riders give her some tips. Most of the guys riding here are friends of mine and they were more than happy to oblige.



She just started so the most she can do is just make herself go forward. I was pretty surprised at how well she can push and pick up speed. I can say with confidence, she has more talent skateboarding than I had at her age.



An Ollie is the bread-and-butter of a street boarders arsenal. A basic ollie is slapping the tail of your skateboard down while pushing the nose of the skateboard forward causing it to "jump". An ollie kickflip is the same, but the skateboard flips 360 degrees along its axis.







This was a failed trick and the board is flying at me. I was able to roll out of the way and no harm was done.

I had a bad experience this last weekend. It wasn't so much damaging my camera in the line of duty, but my camera getting damaged in the hands of someone else. I was with a group of youth this last weekend taking them camping. I wanted to take photos of the entire camping trip, but ended up putting my camera away in the morning of the first day. We had looked at a few areas to camp and one was a bit further down the road from where we initially planned. I thought that would be a better place to camp, so the other adult that was with me hopped in the car and we drove to the next spot. I had my camera out so when we got in the car, I asked him to hold it. When we got to the next spot, he completely forgot he was holding it and jumped out of the car dropping it to the ground. I was still putting the parking brake on when he jumped out, but I knew in an instance that he dropped my camera. I let out a sort of howl as he picked it up and gave it to me. Luckily, I had on a PL filter which saved the lens, but the filter itself was pretty bent. To my surprise, the filter still rotated smoothly despite the bent area. I made a promise to myself never to let that happen again.









I have to say that I was pretty pleased with the photos I took today. Action photos are still something new to me and I pretty much suck at them. Earlier this year I took some photos of a cycling race called the Yakeuchi Classic and completely messed them up. From that experience, I learned of a useful feature on my camera called Auto Focus Continuous. A very handy feature for action shots. I thought I had just the right amount of motion blur to give these photos a sense of action. I am really happy with these photos. I think I'm going to try and take some more skateboarding photos for practice in the near future.