Amami Superman Photography

I mentioned in a previous post about finding some waterfalls that were a bit hard to get to. Yesterday I went to one of those waterfalls and tried to take some photos. On the way to the waterfalls, we drove by a stand of ceder trees. I thought it would be a cool spot to take some shots so I stopped.

So as I was walking around looking up and taking photos, I almost walked right into this 8 legged monster. I'm not sure what they call these spiders here in Amami. They can grow to be very large. I've seen them with leg spans bigger than my open palm hand.




So after dodging spiderwebs and whatnot, I made it back to the car and we continued down the road. My wife doesn't usually come with me when I go out to take nature shots. I knew the spot I was going to was bit dangerous and I could fall and injure myself so I asked her to come along just in case.

Below is a shot from the road. I don't know how well you can tell how steep it is but let me reassure you, it was steep. There was no way I was going to get down there and back up without a good climbing rope. Fortunately, I came prepared with everything I needed. After securely tying the rope to a tree and securing my camera bag and tripod to my body, I inched my way down the mountain side. I have to admit, it was a bit of work getting down there. I was afraid I might have a harder time getting back up. Newspaper headlines flashed through my mind, "Japan Coast Guard Helicopter Called in to Save Fat Man on Cliff" Wonderful! When I got down as far as I could go, I found that the view wasn't that great and there wasn't much of a spot to set up my tripod properly. I was still a good 5 or 6 meters from the bottom but it was nearly impossible for me to get any further and still make it back up.




I did my best to get set up and do to a lot of wind, this was the best shot I got.




It was much to windy to get a shot off without getting any motion blur in the trees and bushes. When I finished and got all my stuff together for the climb up, I sat there and looked up to where my wife was standing and I was thinking, "She's going to have to go for help." To my complete and utter surprise, the climb up was no where near as difficult as the climb down. I think I did it in half the time.

On the way home I thought I would try some thing I've never done before. Take a photo from a moving car. I set the shutter speed to 1/20 sec and stuck my camera out the window and started to shoot on the straightaways.




The above photo is cropped a bit. I thought it was kind of nice. It was something I've never tried before and it turned out better than I thought it would.

So those were some of the photos I took yesterday. Now I'm going to go stretch out my sore muscles.