Amami Superman Photography

It's typical Japanese tradition to cremate the remains of family members passed away and keep the ashes in these monument like family graves. These stone monuments are called haka.

One of the three major holiday seasons in Japan is obon. Traditions for obon vary greatly throughout Japan, but one thing is certain, obon is a time for honoring one's ancestors. I don't know what obon traditions are like in other parts of Japan, but I'll tell you what they do here in Amami.

Obon usually last three days. Before obon starts, the family cleans house sort of like spring cleaning. They do this in order to receive the spirits of their ancestors. Obon is a Buddhist festival and it is believed that our ancestor's spirits come back to visit during this time.

At the beginning of obon, the family goes to their haka and pay their respect first.

So that was our trip to the cemetery to pick up the spirits of my wife's father's side of the family. I wasn't particularly pleased with the photos I took, especially the first one, but I needed one to show you what a typical Japanese cemetery looked like. You only see a small portion of the cemetery in the first photo. Nagata Bochi is actually very large and is probably much bigger than a football field. The haka are built right next to each other with no room in between and you get a sense of claustrophobia looking out across this garden of monuments.

Yesterday was the start of obon here in Amami. The official holiday was from August 13th to the 15th, but most southern islands like Amami go off the traditional lunar calendar and started on the 22nd until the 24th.

I planned on taking some photos of obon this year and I got my camera gear out to clean yesterday. It being summer time and me being quite a sweaty person, my camera and gear gets kind of grimey at times. I try to keep my gear as clean as possible, but sometimes I just don't get the time after using it to clean it. So I took some time to clean my camera and lenses before I went out to take some photos.

After cleaning my gear, my daughter had some coloring pencils out and decided to line them up and take a shot to mess around with in Lightroom 3. I recently upgraded to Lightroom 3 and I haven't really had the chance to mess around with some of the new features it has. I didn't plan on posting this photo, but as I was messing around with it, my wife came up and took a look at what I was working on and thought it looked nice so I thought I would share it.

I did a bit of everything to this photo. I upped the Recovery to 100, upped the Fill Light along with Blacks a bit. I also upped Brightness and Contrast just a little, put the Clarity and Vibrance to 100 and upped the Saturation just a bit. I did a bit of Sharpening and Noise Reduction and gave it a Vignette. Obviously this photo is also cropped a bunch. Here is the original photo to show you how much I did to it. Not that much, but completely different.

This was Jade's first basketball tournament. It was held in June on the 20th. I'm not very good at taking sports shots, especially inside a gymnasium, so I took a few practice shots and decided on an average setting and pretty much stuck with that setting until her second game.

I've always been into basketball even before I was Jade's age. I lived on a reservation and spent a lot of time at my grandmother's place on my father's side of the family. They had a concrete section, probably where a small building used to be, and set up a basketball court to play on. I remember trying to shoot hoops, granny style, and having my cousins giving me pointers. My father also put up a hoop outside our house on a tree, we didn't have any concrete courts, and practicing a bunch on that. I joined the elementary school team when I was in 3rd grade and I still remember my mother taking me out to buy some basketball shoes. I don't want to say how hard my life was growing up, but it wasn't the best and I know how much effort my parents put in to helping us have a happy childhood and for which, I am thankful. I'll be the first to say that my basketball skills are sucktacular, but I have a passion for the game and I owe it to my family for the support they gave me.

I wish I had better framing on this shot, as you can see, the ball is just barely in the top portion of this photo. The D60 only has 3 focusing areas and it makes me wonder if I could do better having more focusing areas with a D300s. I've been giving some thought about my next camera and though there are a few Nikon users in Amami, most of my friends use Canon and have said they would be more than willing to lend me lenses. I'm still thinking about it, but I'm thinking of giving a good Canon body also a try...

Do you look at clouds and find they look like different things? I used to do that when I was a kid. While we were at the beach last Monday, Jade pointed and said, "It looks like a turkey." I told her it looked more like a pigeon in flight. What I really thought it looked like was a Kentucky Fried Chicken drumstick and breast piece...

It was pretty hot last Monday so we took Jade to Ohama Beach Park after work. I was happy to go and take some photos. Photography is like anything else I guess, if you want to get good and stay good at something, you have to keep at it. I haven't taken very many photos over the past 2 months and most of the photos I took from this day were pretty craptacular.

So that was another happy day for us. Jade got to do some swimming, I got to take some photos and Hikari got to... watch us do our things.

The kids in the center ring doing hachigatsu odori are my students from Taken Junior High School. I had a lot of fun attending this festival. I knew most of the people or their children here and it didn't matter where I went, I was continually being greeting by so many people.

My summer vacation has finally started. I was asked to teach summer school not only for the town of Uken, but also Kasari. That was at the first of this month. Now that I'm all finished with that, I'll have the rest of the month off. I'm happy I get some time off, I was getting pretty worn down.

I haven't been very focused with my photography lately. When I do take my camera out with me, the photos I take are pretty terrible. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks I'll be able to slow down and take my time.

I picked out a few photos from the Amami Matsuri this year. I had classes this evening so I was only able to go out for a bit and I returned home early. I took maybe 150 photos, but as I said, most of them were pretty terrible.

This was kind of the shot I was going for. I wanted the fireworks to more to the left, but it just didn't work out. The shots I did frame right were out of focus and this is the best one I ended up with.

I didn't have a long time to spend at the matsuri and I had to return home early for my next class. I suppose it was a good thing anyway, I lost my towel I use to wipe sweat away and I was completely drenched. I was afraid I got my camera drenched as well, but it was OK.

I was kind of bummed that I wasn't able to take any photos this year. I didn't even get to go out for the hachigatsu odori. I did however go to the Uken Matsuri and I was able to take a few fireworks photos there, but the conditions weren't that great. There was no wind and the smoke didn't go anywhere and most shots were pretty terrible again. I believe the last matsuri they have here in Amami is in Yamato Town and hopefully it will be nice weather and I'll be able to get out and take some photos there.