Amami Superman Photography

I know, long time, no posts. sorry It's been a hectic few months. In my last post back in January, I said that I was getting over a case of influenza. I missed a bunch of work that I had to make up and with as busy as my schedule is, it was hard to make up. We also had a trip planned for the end of March to the States to go visit family which made things even more difficult. I haven't been back home to the States in 8 years so dealing with getting new passports for the family and re-entry visas for myself, it was quite a hassle with no immigrations office here in Amami. To make matters worse, I got ear infections in both ears 3 weeks before we were set to leave. A few days before our departure date, my ears had not yet cleared up and I ended up getting minor ear surgery on my right ear. I'll tell you about that some other time. It wasn't pleasant.

So we got back to Amami the first week of this month and did our best getting back in to the groove of things. It was a new school year for Jade so we were busy trying to get her prepared. We had only returned home the day before school started for her. It being a new school year, I also was busy with my teaching job out in Uken. We had a whole load of teachers transfer out which meant we had a whole load transfer in. They had a welcoming party that weekend that I had to attend. I got to meet all the new teachers and found that most of the teachers I work with teaching English had transferred out. Now I'm in the process of learning to work with new teachers.

I got the afternoon off today and I thought I would go and look at the photos I've taken over the past few months and was surprised at how many I have. Although I haven't been posting, I'm still taking my camera out with me and taking photos of whatever. These photos were taken back in January at one of the schools I teach at. I'm not sure what kind of plant this is with the red leaves (are they leaves or flowers?), but they looked pretty so I shot them.

Just up the hill from where I was shooting, I noticed this papaya tree with a load of papayas growing. This last photo was doctored just a bit. I dropped the clarity a bunch and upped the blacks to give the brighter areas in the leaves a glowing effect. I thought it looked nice so I threw this one in too.

So in my last post I said I would make a post about my set up I used for my Halloween studio type photos and here it is.

I made this black backdrop with some fabric I bought at the local fabric store. I used 120cm wide fabric cut in 4 meter sections and sewed them together to make it. The backdrop is held up by 2 long bamboo secured by hooks and wire on opposite walls. I gathered a bunch of cardboard boxes from my wife's family's Sanrio shop and covered the windows with them and duct tape. My wife and I went to the mountains and gathered up 4 full trash bags worth of leaves to spread over the tarp on the floor. We bought 6 jack-o-lantern pumpkins and received some other types of squash to use as props. On the left side of the photo you can see a short table stood on end. This table was my reflection board. I covered it with aluminium top to bottom. On the right side of the photo you can see my DIY soft boxes and also a long florescent light covered in orange and yellow film.

This was probably the most difficult photo to take. The room I'm in isn't that big and I had to position everyone so they're in the shot as well as the edges of the makeshift studio I made. I don't have a lot of room to back up and this photo pushed the limits of the size of the room's settings. The other problem I had with this photo is my wide aperture. Wider apertures have smaller focusing planes and 3 rows of people was very difficult. I had the people in the back lean forward as much as they could without making it look like they were leaning forward so that their faces were somewhat in focus. The lighting I was using was insufficient for the group I was shooting and used quite a bit of Fill Light in Lightroom 3. When you up the Fill Light, you get an amount of noise. I used a lot of Fill Light so I got a lot of noise and had to compensate with Noise Reduction and Sharpening. The above family wanted a S10R size photo printed (4PW Japan size), and I thought it turned out OK. If you got right close, 2 or 3 inches way, you can see the distortions from the Noise Reduction and Sharpening but couldn't notice if you didn't look close. I really don't like to use that much post editing on a photo, but this one couldn't be helped, I had to to make it look relatively nice.

So that's the set up I used for my Halloween photos last year. I'm going to make a slide show post of our Trick-or-Treat parade and maybe another slide show post of the other shots I took of my students and their family Halloween portraits.

I apologize for not posting in so long. My last post was back in October just before Halloween when I was busy trying to get ready for Halloween so I guess I'll pick up from there.

Our Halloween Trick-or-Treat Parade went off without a hitch. We originally had the parade planned for October 31, but we had a typhoon come through days before and we thought it may interfere with our plans so we postponed it until November 3. I took studio type photos of my students and their families again this year and they turned out pretty much like last year's Halloween photos. This year, instead of making a big wall out of lumber I found at the dump, I bought some black fabric and sewed it together to make a backdrop and got a bunch of pumpkins for props as well as leaves to use on the floor. I just chose a few photos to share.

The kid's name in the above photo is Junki (joonkee). So no mistakes are made, I wasn't saying he was junkie or junky. lol

I'm pretty happy with how the photos turned out. There were a few difficult shots that I had to make of a family group using a wide aperture, but I think I'll save that for another post. I'll also make a post of the set up I used to take these photos (super low tech).

I tell you, I had a pretty terrible month with my internet connection. Here's my story.

Last month before Christmas my old Airport Express broke. Well, I thought it broke. I started to look for a new router and I wanted one that I could connect to by LAN and wireless. Apple's routers are a bit expensive and I decided to go with a NEC Aterm WarpStar WR8700N.

My new router arrived around the 27th and I got it out to get set up. After hooking it all up and going in and putting in my ISP settings I opened a browser and saw the internet immediately. "Great!" I thought, as I went to check my email. I use gmail for my email and things come up right away with no problems, but when I tried to send an email with an attachment, the router would stall and the ACTIVE light would go out meaning it wasn't connected to my fiber optic modem. I didn't know what the problem was and I started to search for online support since it was late and the Aterm Support lines would most likely be finished for the day.

While I was searching online for some support for my router, I remembered that I wanted to do a speed test of my connection now that I wasn't on a wireless connection. I went to a speed test site and started the speed test only to have it stall again and the ACTIVE light go out on my new router. Now here's where I get thrown off trying to figure out the problem. I didn't know whether it was a setting with my computer or the router so I decided to connect my computer directly to my fiber optic modem and so see what would happen. After getting it connected things went smooth and I didn't have a problem downloading or uploading. I figured it was a setting with my new router so I decided to call them up the next day.

The next morning after 9:00 o'clock I called up the Aterm Support Line only to find that they were closed for the holidays and wouldn't be back until the 4th of January. Ugh! So I waited patiently with only one computer being able to connect to the internet. Once the 4th rolled around, I called them up only to find the support line busy every time I called. I called several times throughout the day and wasn't able to get a hold of them on the 4th. I tried again on the 5th and finally was able to get through around noon. The support representative was very kind and helpful but in the end, she didn't know what the problem was and said that I may have bought a faulty router and told me to contact the store I bought it from and have them replace it for a new one.

I bought the router from an online shop through Amazon and called them up telling them my situation. They agreed to send me a new router. After talking with them I received a phone call back from them saying that they were sorry and didn't have any more in stock and I would have to wait until they were able to get some from the maker which would take a few days. It took a week for me to get my new router and once it arrived, I didn't want to take any chances so I called up support to have them help me set it up. They pretty much told me exactly what I did to set up my first router. I opened a browser and tried a speed test... It stalled again! What the freek! The representative asked me to try a few different things and we couldn't get it to work. She finally asked me what fiber optic modem I'm using and I read her the number off the back. She said that I had a pretty old modem and maybe that might be the problem.

I called up NTT and asked them to come out and check my connection. In less than an hour they had a guy out here with his laptop testing my connection. Low and behold, he couldn't get it to work on his computer either. It turned out that it wasn't my router that had gone bad, but my fiber optic modem and I never really needed to buy a new router at all. The NTT guy pulled out a new modem and hooked it up to my fiber optic line and connected his computer and it worked like a dream. I hooked up my new router and got everything going and now I have my internet back. Yeehaw!

Our holidays were pretty regular. We got together with my wife's family on New Year's Day, but with the rainy, cold weather we've been having, we didn't do much more than that. With the start of a new year, I'm back to work teaching again and busy as ever. We're planning a trip to America at the end of March which we're pretty excited about. I hope all of you had a wonderful holiday season and I look forward to sharing more photos with you this year.

I don't know if it's the demeanor of all wild boars, but this was one pissed off boar. I guess it doesn't take common sense to understand that wild animals don't like to be penned up. This guy was using its tusks to swipe at the fence hooking it like it was trying to gore me. Although he was in a cage, it was still kind of scary.

I actually had this post all ready to go to be posted and got caught up with work and forgot to post it a few weeks ago. So here it is.

Now some people may think, "How cruel. Keeping a wild animal locked in a cage like that." But people in Amami think, "That's going to make a fine barbecue one day." I have quite a few friends who have licenses and guns to hunt wild boar including my wife's uncle and we frequently get the opportunity to eat some wild boar.

Oh, and I don't know if this boar is 150lbs, probably more like 100lbs. I was just guesstimating.

I thought I would make another post and tell a little more about the deluge we had in Amami last week.

As stated, the above picture is a screenshot in Google Earth of Amami Island. The white lines on the map represent the boundaries between the cities, towns and villages. Although they call these areas towns and villages, they're not towns and villages in the sense that they are centralized places where people live. You could be in the middle of the mountains with nothing around you and still be in Tatsugo Town.

Amami Island has 7 different areas made up of cities, towns and villages. Starting from the northeastern part of the island is Kasari-cho (the cho means town). Next, moving to the southwest, is Tatsugo-cho. After that is Amami-shi (the shi means city). Just west of Amami-shi is Yamato-son (the son means village). South of that is Sumiyo-son. West of Sumiyo-son is Uken-son and Setouchi-cho is southwest of these. I don't know how confusing that explanation is but it seemed a little confusing rereading it. Basically I just moved from the northeastern part of the island to the southwestern part.

When Amami was hit by heavy rains Wednesday, every area in Amami experienced some degree of flooding, land slides, power and phone outages. There were also several areas that even lost mobile phone capabilities. Every major road in Amami became blocked in several areas due to land slides, flooding and erosion. I heard over the radio on the second day that they there were a total of 37 land slides on major roadways. Each and every area in Amami became severed from the neighboring areas and the rest of Amami. Hundreds of people in each area became stranded unable to return to their homes in other areas. I was one of them.

No matter where you are in Amami, you always have at least two ways to get home. The roads were blocked in so many places that pretty much no one was able to move from the area they were in. We caught wind that the people stranded in Koniya down in the southwestern part of the island would be able to take a special ferry home late Thursday night. I remember thinking to myself, "If I could only find a way down to Koniya." It was around 4:00pm on Thursday when we got a phone call saying the road between Uken-son and Shinokawa had opened up. Shinokawa is a small block (or a literal village), in Setouchi-cho. Shinokawa is pretty close to Koniya, but they still had a very large land slide just at the mouth of a tunnel in a small block called Yui between Shinokawa and Koniya. Here is a link where the land slide was in Yui on Google Maps. Anyway, on with the story. It wasn't more than 30 minutes when we got another phone call saying that it was possible to make it past the land slide in Yui but they didn't know how long it would be open for as it was only temporary. Well lickity split, I hopped a ride with another teacher who actually lived in Koniya and we hurried our way to Yui to see if we could get past and make it to Koniya.

We reached the tunnel in Yui and when we came out the other side, there was this towering wall of mud and rock in front of us. Luckily, they still had a sliver of a path cleaned on the very edge of the sidewalk to pass on. We made it past relieved knowing we would make it to our homes that night. I found out later that some of the other teachers in Uken that lived in Naze, were unable to pass after that and were stranded for another night. I think we were pretty lucky to pass from what I heard.

I live in Amami-shi and my commute to Uken-son takes me through Sumiyo-son on Highway 58 and then I switch to Highway 85 which leads the rest of the way to Uken-son. Thursday night, I was able to catch a 2 1/2 hour boat ride from Koniya to Amami-shi (Naze), and reached my home early Friday morning.

The roads in Sumiyo-son aren't completely open but are only open during the daytime and are closed at night. I'm not 100% sure, but I think the times they're open is 7:00am to 10:00pm. Yesterday, it took 2 hours to drive to Uken-son to pick up my car which usually only takes me 45-50 minutes. I figured the traffic would be backed up pretty bad in Sumiyo-son today considering how many people need to go to work in the morning at the same time so I left at 6:30am to get to the blocked areas early. To my surprise, the roads weren't backed up at all and it only took me an hour and 30 minutes to get to work today. I was even more surprised when it only took me an hour and 15 minutes to get home in the afternoon. Although the roads are still bad, they are getting easier to traverse.

It's only at the end of this post that I realized I keep spelling Sumiyo wrong. If you look in my previous post, I spell it Sumio. Not that big of a difference but, lol.