Amami Superman Photography

It's been a very busy month for me. I was asked at the beginning of March if I would be an Assistant Language Teacher (ALT), for the Uken Village here in Amami. I talked it over with my wife and we decided it would be a good thing if I tried it out. The new school year here in Japan starts in April so I started teaching after the first week the students started school. There are 5 different schools that I visit twice a month. The furthest away takes an hour and a half to drive to. I was apprehensive about taking the job at first just because of the distance I would have to travel some days, but after my first month, I'm glad to say it's all worth it. I enjoy teaching kids English. Another plus side to this is it's a good way to promote my own businesses. Living on a small island is all about who you know, so getting out there and meeting new people always helps out. My wife's mother's side of the family is also from Uken Village so when I told my students and the people I work with who I'm married to and what family I'm apart of, they accepted me with open arms.

We are now just starting what the Japanese call "Golden Week". Golden Week is a bunch of holidays starting at the end of April and goes on into May. If you get timing right, you can have a whole week or more off for vacation like we have this year. So today is my second day of Golden Week. I've been so busy with my own work and my new teaching job, I just haven't had time to focus on my blog. I've taken loads of photos, but I just don't have the time to go through them. So today I'm taking the time to go through them and try to make a quick post to let you all know I'm doing fantastic and I'm still here.

As I said, I've taken loads of photos in the past couple of weeks. I have so many, I just decided to choose one photo to share with you today so I can get back to going through the rest.

Yesterday they had an event called osakana matsuri, which basically means, "fish festival". They had loads of different booths that you could buy different sea food from, cooked and uncooked. They also had different events for the children and even a cotton candy booth for them. This is one of the random shots I took that I decided to share with you. This photo has been cropped a bit and I've also adjusted some of the variable settings inside of Lightroom 2, but nothing too drastic. Hopefully I'll be able to get through most of my photos today and make some new posts for you all. From just this fish festival event, I took over 500 photos. I didn't realize I took so many. I also have a lot of photos of barbecues and of days we went to the beach. I'll do my best to sort through them all today.

This shot was taken around the same location as my previous post's photo of the waterfall. There was a fallen log near the stream covered in moss and as I was putting my socks and shoes back on after wading around to get the waterfall shot, I noticed this little guy all alone on top of the log. I don't think I've taken very many shots of this type, but I thought this one turned out well.

Ugh! As I said before in a few previous posts before, I took some time off from posting. During that time I kept taking photos, but I never checked over the photos after uploading them to my computer. Most of them were crap. I was pretty amazed at how bland they were. As you can see from a couple of my previous posts, my photos haven't been that great recently (not that they were ever that great... :P ). So I've kind of put those photos aside and I'll post some newer photos that I've taken since then. This photo isn't that great also, but I thought it was better than the ones I've taken during my break.

Last Sunday I took the family out hunting for waterfalls again. I found this one just as you're starting up Santaro Pass just to the south of the main city of Amami. It was a pretty nice waterfall and I would like to have spent more time there looking for angles but just getting this shot I spent some time and I think that my family following me out to take photos is kind of like me following them out to do some window shopping. I just am not interested and it takes too much of my time. So this is one of the shots I got of this waterfall. The others were just like this but I used different settings. I thought this one turned out the best.

I used 2 filters for this, an ND-4 and a Polarized. It was cloudy and kind of sunny and some of my longer shutter speed shots were blown out when the sun poked through.

This is Nagumi holding one of his spinning tops. Nagumi is 7 years old and his family owns an optic shot just across the street. I recently bought a pair of glasses from them after breaking mine in half. I tried to repair my old glasses with sticky tape, but I just ended up advancing my rank to "King of Nerdom", and that just couldn't be stood for. Here is a photo of me in my fixed glasses. I don't think I fixed them right. Am I doing it wrong? Anyway!

So Nagumi was over at my wife's shop with his tops and I asked him to show me. I have to admit, he was a pro at spinning them. From what I hear, it takes a bit of practice and he hit it every time.

The above trick was also pretty neat. He would hold the string at a slant and the top would slide down the the string. He would then make it slant the opposite direction and the top would slide to the other end of the string. All this while the top is still spinning. It was pretty amazing.

So those were some photos I took of the Amazing Nagumi and his spinning tops. It was pretty dark in my wife's shop compared to outside so the photos were a bit underexposed. Enjoy!

I don't think of myself as an environmentalist, but I do find a sense of sadness and anger when I see sights like this. I wasn't born here in Amami, nor Japan for that matter, but over the past 13 years it's become my home and it feels like my home more than any other place I've lived. This kind of blatant disregard makes me shake my head in awe and I wonder how someone can just leave something like this and not feel any guilt or remorse.

So there I was, out for a drive with my family looking for things to photograph and places we could play. I saw a small stream as we were driving through the mountains and I decided to stop and see if there was anything to photograph. The above photo was just off the side of the road where we parked the car. Just to the side of the road near the stream was a path and we made our way into the forest there.

Up till then we had pretty sunny weather but it kind of got overcast when we stopped to get out.

On the way back down the mountain, the sun poked out through the clouds and I took a moment to photograph this fern which I thought turned out kind of nice. I upped the Saturation a bit to make the colors pop.

Took a short drive one afternoon with my wife and we decided to go check out another damn that I haven't been before. I've seen photos of it and knew the general area of the island it was in so we didn't have any troubles finding it.

Nothing too great about these photos. I kind of like the panorama so I thought I would share them with you. I took my daughter to see this damn a few days later and she had some fun then. I'll share those photos in a different post. :)

I had to go pick up some orange boxes for my mother-in-law down by the port and right next door to the place I picked them up was a horde of cats in this drive way all grouped together like they were waiting for something. There were so many, in fact, that I couldn't count them all. There had to have been well over twenty. I didn't have my camera with me at the time so I after dropping off the boxes, I grabbed my camera and went back. When I got back, they had dispersed and were all over the place. I snapped only a few shots because I felt I was trespassing and didn't want to stay too long.

I never saw the owner and I wonder how they could take care of so many cats. How could you feed so many? I can just image these cats taking down large animals like the cats of the African Savannas with coordinated attacks and deadly precision. If I work harder at my photography, I could go work for National Geographic...

Not