Amami Superman Photography

Today's photos are of sumomo (plum blossoms). Sumomo season starts just as sakura season ends here in Amami. My previous posts of sakura were posted about a week after I took the photos but, due to bad weather, I haven't been able to get out and take more sakura photos for over a week now. We had some great weather yesterday and as I was out driving around looking for sakura, I noticed that most of the sumomo trees have started to blossom so I took photos of them instead.

To say it simply, yesterday just clicked for me. You'll laugh at this but, I focused on focusing. Using my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 at f/1.4 has taught me a lot of things about focusing. One of those things is not relying on the Auto Focus when taking photos like these. For some of these shots, I used the Auto Focus to get a soft focus and then switched to Manual Focus and did the fine tuning focus. I had a load of semi close up photos like these first three that turned out very nice.

In all honesty, the D60 has a pretty small viewfinder and it's pretty tough to focus manually. I've been thinking of buying a Katz Eye to help with that, but I don't think it will help with photos like these. What I really need is a full frame format camera with a larger view finder but, they're just a bit to expensive for me.

These first three photos were cropped from the originals a bit. Other than that, post editing to all the photos pretty much only consisted of adjusting Exposure just a bit along with Vibrancy and Saturation. I was going to try and give them a soft glow as I did in my previous posts of sakura, but it just didn't seem to do justice to these photos. Crisp seemed the way to go.

This last photo is of some very yellow flowers that were blooming near the sumomo trees I was photographing. They were so completely yellow, it was almost unreal.

I'm so happy with how these photos turned out. Photos like these help me stifle the feeling I get when I take bad photos, blame it on my camera or lenses, and want to buy a new camera and new lenses. I will buy a new camera in the long run and some new lenses, but not for a while. I still have a lot to learn with what I have.