Amami Superman Photography

It's one of those times where I wish I had paid more attention to what I was doing and thought about it a bit more. I'm not big into flashes and the restaurant they used had pretty poor lighting. I went with my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens. That wasn't a bad chose but the camera settings I used were. I thought I could get away with slower shutter speeds, around 1/30 sec and up so I could use a lower ISO (ISO 400), and not have the photos so grainy. I should have used ISO 800 and a faster shutter speed, but that's spilt milk. I guess I know better now...

I'll give you little background info on the bride and groom. Yumi is a teacher in Kagoshima and Yasuhiro owns a restaurant called SusuMucho here in Amami. They have been dating for some time now and recently they signed a marriage licence and turned it in to the city hall. Most of their close friends knew about this but not very many. Yasuhiro decided to give Yumi a surprise wedding party and invite all their close friends.

Yasuhiro told nothing to Yumi about the day of the party. He picked her up at the airport and simply told her he had a few errands to run that morning. He then drove her to a bridal salon where they picked out dresses and tuxedos. She had no idea about any of this or what was going to happen. She thought that they were picking things out for a later date.

After they had everything picked out, they fixed up their hair and makeup and got them all dressed up. The bridal salon then drove them to a photography studio just across the street where I live and took wedding photos. The poster you see in the above photo was taken that morning at the photo studio. My wife and daughter took a sneak peek at them while they were shooting. Yumi got so many surprises this day. She didn't know she was going to be taking photos so it must have been a real treat for her.

I don't know much about what happened after that up to the wedding party. When they got to the restaurant, everyone was waiting with cracker fireworks filled with confetti. As they walked in the door and the crackers went off, I think she was so scared she tried to run away.

When they got situated, the first thing they did was have a wedding ceremony. The man performing the ceremony is Shoichi. Shoichi is in no way a man of the cloth, but instead, a very comical man. As you can see in the photo, he put his suit on backwards and taped a not-so-straight cross on. Even thought I wasn't feeling well, I couldn't stop from laughing.

They then had a friend come up and give a speech before they all toasted to the the bride and groom.

After cutting the cake, they had a few musical numbers performed by different people and a slide show of Yasuhiro and Yumi filling out their marriage license and some different things they were photographed in.

At the end of the party, each gave a small speech. Yumi was all emotional by this point and could barely squeak a word out. When she finally was able to talk, she mentioned how this was better than anything she had imagined. When they first signed their marriage license, she didn't expect a wedding and was happy and content just getting a ring.

I'm not sure what they call this in Japanese or English. At the end of some receptions, everyone gets together and makes a sort of tunnel for the newly weds to go through. I call it the gauntlet because some of the more drunk people take shots at them like in the above photos.

Once they got outside, I had room on my SD card for one more photo and this is the photo I shot. I took 866 photos and completely filled my 8GB SD card.

For a honeymoon, they are going to take a trip to Australia for a week or so at the end of this month.

I recently was able to go through all the photos I took and I made a disc for them. When I brought the disc to Yasuhiro, he showed me some of the video another friend took of that day at the bridal salon. Yasuhiro seemed a very happy man.