Amami Superman Photography

Yesterday was the day of the big solar eclipse. Everyone was excited and anticipated it for months. Unfortunately, it was cloudy. We had really nice weather for the past few weeks, but turned cloudy the night before and actually rained a bit after the eclipse.

We probably have well over 12,000 people visiting the island to watch the eclipse. Just from the news and what friends have heard, a few people were bitten by habu, lots of people arrested for driving while intoxicated and general rowdiness. I even heard some people were hospitalized for eating some plants that were poisonous. It was amazing to see over 50 people waiting at a bus stop when 50 people wouldn't fit on a regular bus here. I heard they had to borrow some extra police from Kagoshima to help out with all that was happening here the past few days.

Since it was cloudy, whenever you looked up to see the sun with your special glasses, all you would see is a blob of light in the sky. For the first 2/3 before totality, you would get some breaks in the clouds and they would be just thin enough to see the actual shape of the sun. After that, the clouds came in pretty think and it was difficult to see any shape at all.

I did my best to take some photos of the eclipse. Just looking up at the sky, all you would see is a blog of light coming through the clouds. I thought that if I closed the aperture all the way and set the shutter speed to something very fast, I would be able to get rid of some of the glare. It seemed to work for the most part and I was able to get a few shots that you can see the shape of the sun in.

The above photos is taken with the smallest aperture and fast shutter speed so the dark areas really weren't that dark. If fact, things just looked like a large bright blob in the sky. The low clouds made it difficult to take any photos. I had to time my shots when the lower clouds broke.



Here is a shot just seconds before the eclipse is about to begin. I got a nice break in the lower clouds and this is what I got.



The whole eclipse lasts about 3 hours. You get an hour and a half or so before totality and another hour and a half after. This shot was taken almost half way through the first half of the eclipse. You can see the upper portion of the sun is being covered. I imagine if there was less glare from the clouds, we would see that it was probably covered about half way.

I think it sprinkled rain just a bit without me noticing. After checking out the photos after I got home, I notices spots on most of the photos after a certain point.

One other cool thing I thought to mention, as we got closer to totality, the temperature went down a few degrees. It was almost chili even.



I was lucky to get this shot. Just a sliver of the sun and the clouds were really coming in thick by this time. You could actually look right up at the sun without the special glasses with all the cloud cover we had. It would have really been neat to see this on a cloudless day.



The remaining sun was just a pinprick in the sky. It probably looked a lot bigger than it actually was when seeing it through the clouds. And then just like that, the light completely disappeared and it was all dark. The horizon looked like it would at dusk after the sun has dipped down past the horizon.

When our three minutes were up, the sun came poking back through the clouds. One thing we found kind of funny is, it seemed the sun came back a lot quicker than it disappeared. After that the clouds were so think we couldn't see anything. We had work in the afternoon so we decided to pack things up early and head out before the traffic got too bad.

All in all, it was a fun experience. As I said before, I'm thinking of going to see the one in 2012 up in Kagoshima. Hopefully that will be good weather and we'll be able to actually see the corona.

These are the other photos I took when we went to Ohama Beach the day before yesterday.

I'm not sure if "yadokari" is an Amami dialect or if they use this everywhere in Japan.



I wasn't too close when I took these photos because this hermit crab was a bit frightened of me. It wouldn't come out if its shell if I was too close so these photos are cropped a bit.





In a previous post I mention and a famous artist named Tanaka Isson. I've seen a few of his paintings of adan. They have a museum here in Amami and his paintings are there on display. I also came across a site that had a few of his painting posted here.



Many people have taken sunset photos with a silhouette of adan in them. I feel it's a bit a cliche and I've never tried to take one until now.











So these are some of the other photos I took the day before yesterday at Ohama Beach.

Yesterday it was pretty hot so we decided to go to the beach after Jade got home from school. I'm not sure what the temperature was yesterday but it was about the same as today. Today is about 90℉ with around 80% humidity. I can't wait until mid August!

We recently enrolled Jade in a swimming school. She goes every Saturday in the afternoon. Her class starts at 4:00pm and my English classes end at 4:00pm so by the time I actually get out to see her, she's just finishing up and I don't get the chance to take any photos, unless I go into the women's shower room which wouldn't go over too well...











I was trying to take some close up shots with a thin depth of field of something else when I took these shots and I had the camera set on aperture priority with aperture wide open. I'll post the photos I was actually trying to take when I took these in another post.





While visiting my wife before we were married, we were at the beach and I came across a heart shaped piece of coral and gave it to her. Ever since then she collects heart shaped coral.



Missy likes to get wet and then goes crazy trying to dry herself off. We tried to clean her off as best as we could before we left but she still had sand in her eyes, nose and everywhere else.









I was having a difficult time with my 18-55mm lens today. I was getting some weird lens flare that I never had before. I cleaned the lens but it didn't go away. I've taken plenty of sunset photos before but today was the first time I've had it happen. Here is a photo with the lens flare in the right portion of it. Here is one more with the flare in the upper half. I don't know, maybe I just never noticed it before in my other photos...

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.

I think we got a late start for the rainy season here in Amami. It's usually over by now but we've had pouring rain for the past couple weeks. Yesterday it finally gave up and I took the family out.

We decided to go to Ayamaru Misaki just north of there airport. I was expecting it to be kind of crowded but, to my surprise, it wasn't. I took some sunrise photos earlier this year from this spot.

The first thing we noticed when we drove into the parking lot were these 5 mini bikes.

Except for the green one, these bikes are customized Honda Gorillas and Honda Monkeys. All of which have 50cc engines. Gorillas have a squarer gas tank while Monkeys have a round one like the red bike has in the front. I don't know the other differences between the two bikes, but I believe their parts are interchangeable.





As we were walking out to the edge of the reef, I came across a girl running toward me screaming my name. When she got closer I realized she was a student of mine. Although most Japanese have straight hair, China has naturally curly hair and is very cute in pigtails.



There aren't many shells to find out here on the reef beds. You can find a lot of mussels that people like to gather to take home to cook up for a meal. I'm not too fond of mussels or shell fish, but it all depends on how they're cooked.



Although there were a lot of clouds this day, there was a lot of blue sky also. I tried to take these photos with the sky as the subject but they just didn't seem to work for me. I was kind of annoyed with myself because I forgot my polarized filter at home.









The name of this drink is Deka Melon Cream Soda. "Deka", or "dekai", means "big" or "huge". The drink is 500ml (about 16 or 17 ounces), hence the "Big Melon".

I was looking for something to drink but most of what this particular vending machine had seemed like generic brands.


This particular beverage caught my attention and I had to try it. It wasn't that great. I did a search in Wikipedia for this drink and came across a page for it. I thought the part about the 500ml bottles was a bit funny.

I remember the other types of shady cola they had back home, like Jolt. This next drink's name kind of reminded me of that, "Hard Spark Cola". This drink falls in the I'll-never-drink-that-again category.