Amami Superman Photography

In my previous post, I posted some photos from last October that I never got around to looking at until recently. These photos are from the same day in the morning and afternoon.

I teach English at a private Catholic pre-school called Shinai Youchien. They had their "undoukai" (field day) on October 17, of last year. I'm not a regular teacher, I just teach a few hours out of the week to the different classes they have. They sent me an invitation in the mail to come see the undoukai so I thought I would go and take some photos of my students. Little did I know that the invitation was a "Guest of Honor" type invitation. They sent a bunch of these kinds of invitations out to different people like the Mayor of Amami City and other important people like that. When I got there, they pinned this red and white ribbon on me and told me where to sit. I was a bit embarrassed by it all. I brought my daughter Jade with me and she sat next to me but I had to have her go play somewhere else because all her friends that were there kept coming to see her and I felt they maybe disturbing the other guests of honor around me.

So I sat there in the special section for the special people feeling I didn't deserve this kind of attention. But that didn't stop me from taking photos. I would have liked to have moved around a bit but I just sat there in my seat and did my best. It was about this time that I was learning all about zoom and aperture. I used my Nikkor 55-200mm f/4.0-5.6 for all these shots. To understand what I was doing better, I shot in Manual Mode. Instead of setting my aperture to f/4.0, I set it to f/5.6 because I knew I would be zooming in and out and if I left my camera at the same shutter speed, I would get darker photos when I zoomed in when the aperture changed. So I decided to sacrifice a little brightness for consistency. This way I could practice a little more on framing and composition without having to worry about settings that much. Almost all the photos were taken with 1/200 sec shutter, f/5.6 at ISO 1600. I took some of the first photos with my camera set to -1/3EV by accident, so they seem a bit darker.

I took close to 300 photos of the children and as I went through them yesterday and today, I had a heck of a time trying to chose which ones I wanted to use for a post. There were just so many. So instead of making bunch of different posts of old photos, I decided to make a slideshow out of them. I hope you like it.