Amami Superman Photography

This last Sunday we had plans to go out and do a canoe tour of the mangrove forest they have here in Amami. It was still hours from high tide so we decided to go for a drive in the meantime. I've been scoping out a few areas to take photographs of waterfalls but I've only been near them when it was dark out so I took advantage of this time to check them out. The first area I went to didn't turn out to be a waterfall at all, but a small damn. Scratched that one off the list...

On the way back up the path, I came across this small salamander type lizard. They have a bunch of different lizards like this in Amami but this is the only one with a cobalt blue tail.

After that we made out way over the mountains towards the south where we would be doing the canoe tour. As we made our way over, we came across a bunch of varieties of hibiscus. I'll admit, I was lazy and really didn't get out of the car to take these photos, but instead used my 55-200mm zoom lens and just opened the window and shot. None of these photos have been cropped.



















Amami also grows bananas, passion fruit, mangos, oranges, dragon fruit and lots of sugarcane but they are harvested during different times of the year. Later on during the winter, it will be time to harvest oranges. They have a couple of different varieties of oranges and they too aren't harvested at the same time. Is harvest the correct word to use to gather fruit off the trees? I'm not sure.

So those are some of the shots I took before we started our canoe tour last Sunday.

Last Thursday we decided to go to my friend Eiji's yakitori restaurant, Torishige. For those of you that don't know what yakitori is, it's basically skewered chicken grilled over an open charcoal flame. Eiji uses top choice chicken for his yakitori so you can expect to pay a pretty penny if you go there to eat. This was my first time since he's opened his restaurant. I've always wanted to go, but I also knew how expensive it would be so the half of me that wants so save money won out over the side of me that wants to eat something yummy... until now.

The above photo is of Jade waiting for us to get ready and leave. It was kind of a nice night. It was just a bit cloudy but clear enough to catch patches of open sky and see a sliver of a moon.





They use all the different types of meat found on a chicken, including things like the gizzard. You would probably think, "There's no way I would eat chicken gizzard!", but unless you knew what you were eating, you wouldn't think it's that bad.



Jade likes her umeboshi as does my wife.

Last month during Jade's summer vacation, we took her to see a large indoor aquarium. They recently had a bunch of baby sea turtles hatch and we thought it would be fun for her to go see them.



They provided cabbage for the kids to feed the turtles. They made it clear that you don't give it to the turtles directly from hand to mouth. If the turtles bit you, they would take chunk of flesh when they did. Although they warned the group, I still saw some people feeding them that way.



If you've every played the game Hungry Hungry Hippo, this is pretty much what it looked like. The turtles' heads would shoot out and gobble up the cabbage. They were pretty cute.

The turtles in the blue bin are only weeks old. I would have expected them to be a bit bigger when they hatched, but they were pretty small.





When you held the sea urchin in the water, it would crawl across your had. It was funny a sensation.









They didn't have these baby turtles out so the public could view them. This turtle was only days old and they had them in a separate building in the back where they kept the new fish they caught to use in the aquarium. A friend of mine works at the aquarium and he let us go to the back building to see the new fish and turtles.

Jade really enjoyed herself. She keeps asking to go back. I suppose we will sometime in the near future.

Kakeroma Island is the island just south of Amami Oshima. It's only a 10-15 minute boat ride from the town of Koniya. Earlier this month, work had my wife and me down in Kakeroma for a few hours. I wanted to spend more time there but it was a regular weekday and we needed to be back before our daughter, Jade, got home from school. So as we drove around Kakeroma trying to get our business done as fast as we could, I stopped here and there to take a few photos. I know there are plenty of places to take photos, but we just didn't have the time nor the opportunity to get to those places. Still, I was able to take a few shots so I thought I would share them with you.

On the ferry, they had a binocular type device that cost 100 yen to use. I took this photo because I thought it was cool that this device was made by Nikon.













I kind of laughed when I saw this swing. If you were right up next to this swing, you would see that it is right close to the edge. If you were swinging on this, you would be swinging out over the almost cliff like mountain side. Pretty scary. I couldn't imagine putting Jade on that and pushing her... scary.




Well, those were the few photos I was able to take while we spent out short time on Kakeroma this month. I'd like to go camping there and spend some time driving around to find better places to take photos.

I know that in recent years, sushi bars and restaurant have become more and more popular in the Unite States. I haven't been back for some time and I really don't know how popular they are. Here in Japan, they have a type of sushi restaurant called, "kaiten-zushi".

To me, kaiten-zushi is real Japanese fast-food. A basic translation is, "revolving sushi". They put the sushi on small saucer size plates and the plates are put onto a revolving conveyor belt. The conveyor belt moves the sushi around the room and customers choose what they want to eat and take it straight off the conveyor belt. If there's a particular kind of sushi you want, that you can't find on the conveyor belt, you can make an order and they will bring it to you.



Last month we went out for sushi and I decided to take a few shots of the different kinds of sushi they had. The first photo of this post is my daughter's favorite, salmon eggs. They take a regular piece of sushi rice and wrap with a seaweed and top it with salmon eggs. It's like coo coo for cocoa puffs with my daughter.

The above photo is a sushi roll filled with natto. For most foreigners, natto is a ghastly food. Basically, natto is fermented soy beens. Most Japanese people like it, but some do not. It's one of those foods that you like or don't. I myself try to stay away from it at any cost.










Again, my main focus with these photos was to practice depth of field. I feel I'm getting a better grasp with how to do it. What I like most about these photos is not just the depth of field, but where the focus point is. The objects in the front are out of focus as are the objects behind my subject. I don't think I've taken very many photos like this before.

First of all, I would like to apologize for not posting in a few weeks. I'd like to say I was taking a break, but the truth of the matter is I was overwhelmed by work. It wasn't until this last weekend that I was able to actually get a day off. Work had me out and about most of the time, but I found it hard to take time to take any photos. I did get a few opportunities to take some photos, but all in all I didn't take very many this past month.

Last month on the last week of Jade's summer vacation, we decided to go have a barbecue at the river. It was refreshing swimming in the river. A lot cooler than the beach. The barbecue and swimming soon turned into crawdad hunting. In the past we used to catch crawdads to eat; now we catch them to put into our big fish tank.

When we first arrived to this spot, I was surprised to see 5 or 6 aluminum cans in the river. I'm no tree hugging Greenpeace environmentalist, but that's one thing that I really can't stand is people throwing their trash away like that. I borrowed my daughter's goggles and fished out all the cans and a few plastic bottles. The water was very cold and refreshing. After that I put together our small barbecue grill and started up the charcoal.


We were barely finished with lunch and they were back in the river starting to look for crawdads. We actually caught quite few.



That night after we got home I thought it would be cool to take some photos of the crawdads in our fish tank that we caught that day.





I have to admit that it was pretty warm this summer. It's just now starting to cool down. It's still hot and humid, but not quite like mid summer. It didn't rain that much this last rainy season and we didn't have that many typhoons come through. Some people are worried we may have a water shortage next year. That's El Niño for you.

The Sazanami Band is a band from Itsubu Elementary School here in Amami. I'm not sure if they only play the traditional taiko and shamisen, but they did for the parade. I was pretty impressed with this group. They were enthusiastic about what they were doing and it sounded neat.

The above photo is a shot of the big flatbed crane truck they had at the beginning. I like how they decorated it.


















After their big jump and they all went quiet, this girl came running out and starting yelling. Then all at once they starting playing and singing again but with even more enthusiasm this time.



The tempo of the song was much faster than before and they seemed to be hopping and dancing around even more than before. The girl without a drum in the above photo seems to really be enjoying herself.



They had some climactic drumming in the end. They started kind of soft and low then grew louder and higher as they screamed a big, "HEY!!" at the end.

I thought this was the best part of the parade. Watching these kids play made me smile.