Amami Superman Photography

Holy jeeze! As I started to make this post, I was wondering if I hadn't taken photos of these kinds of flowers before and went back to check older posts. As I got into searching, I went back and started looking at all my older posts as I sometimes do. I realized that I've been taking photos for over 2 1/2 years now. That's not the holy jeeze part I'm talking about. The holy jeeze part is I've really fallen off my game in the last 8 months. I'll admit that work has been busy and I haven't made posts as much as I would like to, but I looked at some of the photos I haven't posted and they really aren't that great. And the photos I have posted don't really compare to the photos I took a year ago. I feel I don't have a strong talent for taking photos, but for what I do have, how does the saying go? "Use it or lose it" I need to get out there more! So I guess you could say that I'm a bit ashamed of myself personally as I know I can take better photos.



Anyway! I'll stop the rant there. Although I haven't been taking photos as much as I used to, I still learn a bunch from the photos I do take, like fluorescent light and sports shots. But, with summer setting in, I know I'll have plenty of opportunities to get out there and start honing my skills again.



It was a cloudy day and the sun breaks were frequent. I upped my ISO after it got cloudier and was able to take this photo. The colors seem pretty close to what I saw and that's what I like about it. I think it turned out pretty nice.





As I was taking these photos, I could hear the buzz of a bee flying around me. I found it and decided to take some photos of it as it lit from one flower to the next and try to catch it in flight. At first, I couldn't get any decent photos. I would auto-focus on it, but as it flew away, it would be out of focus when I snapped the shot. So I switched to manual focus and tried my luck. I took around 15 photos like this one, but this was the closest I came to a nice shot. This photo was cropped almost to a 1:1 ratio.

So there are some pretty pink flowers. I don't have a clue what they are and I'm hoping that a botanist viewer, Peter from Whales, will be kind enough to enlighten me if he knows what they are. Cheers

Believe it or not, I didn't do anything to change the vibrancy nor saturation in the above photo. I was surprised when I first saw it. Usually the photos I shoot don't look as colorful and vibrant as I see when I shoot. I did, however, up the contrast a bit and lowered the clarity to max for this photo.



For this photo I upped the exposure a bunch, not sure how much, +1.65 in Lightroom. I added some recovery and blacks, gave it some clarity and also upped the vibrancy a bit and lowered the saturation a tad.

These two photos look pretty different and I notice that when they are on the same page, the second photo makes the first one look weird. But when I'm looking at them separately, the first one looks really nice to me. Especially when I leave my computer for a while and come back and it's the first photo I see. I like it. But something about the second photo makes it look weird when they're on the same page.

I posted some photos of hydrangea a few posts early and I didn't know what they were. Peter from Whales was kind enough to leave a comment and tell me what they were. So, thanks Peter. :)

And at least this time I remembered to give this post a title...

I went out to teach in Uken at a nursery school today. My wife likes kids just as much as I do and she tagged along with me. On the way home we stopped at several different spots to pick flowers and take photos. This isn't the first stop, but I thought I would start off with these photos to give you an idea of the kind of day it was.

As you can see in the above panoramic photo that it was a pretty cloudy day but it did have its breaks and the sun shown through bright during our many stops.

The above photo was created in Photoshop using the Merge to Panorama option from 3 photos. This is about the angle of view you would have, with a little more vertical width, looking from the side of the road where I was shooting from. It was a very contrasting shot. The sun was shining down on us, but wasn't shining anywhere else besides the foreground. I did a bit of post editing to this panorama because it didn't have the same contrasty feel that I saw when I was shooting it. I feel this is pretty close to what I saw.

Also, the name of the photo is "Somewhere", because I forgot to recharge the batteries for my hand-held GPS and couldn't get the exact coordinates. I tried to look it up on Google Earth, but just couldn't find the spot. I try to geo-encode my photos for the ones that are points-of-interest if you're ever inclined to come to my island. :)

Photoshop did a great job merging these photos. After merging these photos, I upped the Recovery along with the Fill Light a bit and maxed out the Clarity in Lightroom. I also upped the Vibrancy a bit and lowered the Saturation a smigde. After doing this, I felt the clouds didn't have the clarity I saw so I used the Graduated Filter tool and upped the Clarity of the clouds a bit more. This is what I turned out with and I thought it was pretty close to what I saw.



As I was all enthralled at the view at hand, my wife was more interested in the flowers at the side of the road.



I don't know what these flowers are called, but as it turns out, I hear they are poisonous. She didn't know this at the time, but when we got home, my wife's mother told her that they were and that people try to get rid of these flowers as much as possible. I don't think they are poisonous to the touch, as my wife didn't have any reaction to picking them. I imagine, if they are poisonous, that they need to be digested to have any affect.



This photo is straight out of the camera and I haven't done any post editing to it. It's not a good photo but I thought I would throw it in to give you an idea of what I was shooting. This tree's blossoms were kind of high up and my 18-55mm lens just didn't get close enough so I used my 55-200mm lens to get these next shots.

I don't know what kind of tree this is, but it's in full bloom right now. If you look at the panoramic photo I took, you can see some of these blossoms in the lower left hand corner. I mentioned this before in previous posts, but until I started taking photos, I never noticed the different flowers and blossoms that bloomed around the island during different times of the year until I started to take photos. It seems that where ever I go, I'm always noticing new things that I never would have if I had never taken up photography.



As the name of the photo says, I maxed the Contrast to give it this contrasty feel and tabbed down the Clarity to give it a softer feel. It's not a great photo, but I feel it turned out nice. Whether or not you like this kind of photo, I have been more inclined to make photos with more contrast, and it appeals to me. This next photo was posted edited with similar settings.



So those are some of the photos I took on my way home from teaching today. I have a bunch of more photos to share and I'll make posts for those soon.

It's now 11:30pm as I write this and it's a bit late for me. I have to wake up early for work and this usually is the problem I face. I take photos quite regularly, but I just can't find the time to go though them, pick out the photos I like, and make a blog post for them. It's kind of time consuming and I just can't seem to find the time to do it. It's something that I love to do, but the demands on life are a bit difficult. On the other hand, how does that that saying go...

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

Post Edit: LOL, I was so tired last night, that I forgot to give this post a title before posing it. That's why the title is "Oops!"

As I was shooting the previous two photos, I had crawled just a bit into the bushes to get them. I failed to see this on the way in, but fortunately saw it on the way out, just barely.

In my previous post I mention that I finally got my camera working again. We had a typhoon come through last weekend but we've had fabulous weather after that. Since I got my camera out and functional again, I decided to take it to work with me and see if I couldn't find something to shoot. On the way home I came across some flowers on the side of the road and decided to stop. I'm terrible with names of flowers so I couldn't tell you what these are. Anyway, I'm happy to have my camera back functioning again, which reminds me, I need to buy a new PL filter since I lost my old one last year.

I took this photo back in February. It was late in the season for sumomo, but I was able to get this shot coming home from teaching in Uken. Here is the post I made last year during the sumomo season.

My friend Jeffrey Friedl came up with a great plugin for Lightroom 3 that lets you use Photoshop, like a plugin, editing you photos in a non-destructive way. I tried his plugin for this photo.

I cropped the original in Lightroom and also adjusted some of the variable settings and then used Jeffrey's plugin to further enhance my photo in Photoshop duplicating the original layer and giving the duplicate a multiply blending and adjusting the opacity and fill. With this, I was able to bring the texture of the pedals out more, more than I could have in Lightroom 3 alone. Jeffrey's plugin made my work flow less of a hassle than I would have just editing directly out of Lightroom. I'm still getting used to using his plugin, but it makes my work flow much less easier when I want to edit photos more than the boundaries that Lightroom will allow. Much thanks to Jeffrey.

In the end, this photo isn't that great and I probably did more to it that I should have, but it was just a test for my friend's plugin. I think it worked pretty well. Here is the original photo if you want to know what it looked like.

I probably didn't explain how Jeffrey's plugin works to it's full potential, as I don't know myself, but it helped my work flow become a lot easier.

I've seen plenty of aloe vera plants, but this is the first time I've ever seen one in bloom. I imagine that aloe vera are succulent plants, kind of like cacti, and only bloom once a year. I'm not sure how rare this is, but it's the first time I've seen it.

I took this photo on an family outing we had to go see the cherry blossoms early February. It's the first time I've seen anything like it so I though I would share it with you all.