Amami Superman Photography

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.

OK, so I don't have a, "Things to do before I die." list, and sure enough, "Survive a natural disaster.", would not be something on this list if I had one. I just thought it would be funny to make one. Ha ha ha...

Well, dang, where to start? I guess I should start out with telling you how Amami got hit by a natural disaster and then tell you about my experience.

Amami is a subtropical island. In the spring, we have a rainy season. The rainy season is determined by weather pressure wether or not we have rain. We also get a slight rainy season in the fall, as the weather pressure turns back south (I think they call it tropical pressure in Japanese). With that tropical weather pressure line falling right across Amami, compounded with the effects of typoon Megi, we had unprecedented amounts of rain fall here in Amami. We had, in the city of Amami, a record of 736mm from the time it started in a little over a 24 hour period. I read on a news site somewhere (but can't find the site again), that stated the record of rain fall in Amami, over a 24 hour period, was 500 something millimeters an hour in 1976, which was completely destroyed by this new record. With a first hand experience, I can say that it was a scary 24 hours.

Although I've only heard of major natural disasters like the sunami in India, earth quakes in Haiti and Chile and things like hurricane Katrina, being this close to something this big makes me realize just how devastating natural disasters can be, being a part of one. It doesn't compare to those kinds of major disasters, but it was a disaster none the less and I feel for those who have been effected by them.

The rains started on Tuesday night. I remember being at home and hearing the hard rain start at around 11:00pm. I have satellite TV and it was about this time that I could no longer watch TV. I tried to go to sleep but the rains were so heavy it kept me awake most of the night. I eventually went to sleep only to wake up at about 5:30pm to the sound of the rain. I got up and went to my school where I teach English and started to prepare for my lessons for the day. I hadn't heard of any warnings at all and just went about my day. By 7:30am, when it was time for me to head out to Uken, we decided that I should drive my daughter to school. While heading out, I absentmindly left my backpack full of my the items I use for my lessons, along with my wallet, mobile phone and money at the door. I drove my daughter to school and made my way out to Uken (which is an hour drive to the board of education offices in Uken). It wasn't until I arrived at the offices that I had realized forgot my backpack. "Oh well", I thought. I then drove out to the school I was scheduled to teach at in Nagara and taught my classes. I finished up just before noon and then started for home. The rain was more than usually but I didn't think anything of it as I knew we had a typhoon close (unless you're in the middle of a typhoon, they're not that worrisome).

As I was making my way home, I came across several places where rainwater gushed from the side of mountain and left amounts of silt and rocks in the road. Again, I chalked this up to the heavy rain, but didn't think anything of it (not thinking things could get worse). I made it about half way home when I came to a place in Sumio where the water was exceedingly deep. I parked my car and got out in the rain to see just how deep it was to see if I could pass. I walked about 100 meters in knee high water around a corner only to see that the river in the valley had overflowed and the entire valley had turned into a huge ravaging river. As soon I saw this, I knew I was in trouble. I rushed back to my car as fast as I could, got back into my car and drove as fast as I could back to Uken. Here is a link to Google Maps of the area that was flooded by the river all along Highway 58.

While driving back to Uken, I came across places that had loads of silt and rocks deposited by water cascading off the mountain that wasn't there before when I came. It was then I felt this growing feeling like, "Oh crap, this is big!" With my windshield wipers at full blast, I hurriedly made my way over and down the mountain towards Uken. There's a small bridge at the bottom of this road that only one car can pass at a time. When I crossed this bridge going home, I noticed how much the river had risen, but the bridge still had a good 2 meters of clearance above the river water. When I reached this same bridge, the river was just brimming it with water flower over the road on both sides. I stopped the car just before the flowing water before the bridge and hesitated, deciding whether not I should cross. Although the bridge was being overcome by the river, it didn't seem to be in any immediate danger, so I floored it and shot across the bridge and flowing water and made it safely across. There were several places after the bridge that were flooded, but I was able to drive my car past and make it back to the offices, which were in a safe place. Here another link of the bridge I floored it across in Google Maps. This place actually has a road view if you zoom in close enough. When zoomed in close before you get to road view, you'll see a concrete company that makes concrete ditches and things of that sort on the southern side of the river after the bridge and a couple of orange orchards on the northern side. This was all completely submerged by this river. While looking at this bridge in road view, the buildings you see plus the large tree near the buildings were all you could see besides the river. It was huge.

I was completely drenched from walking in the rain and luckly, but not so lucky, the offices had a washer and drier in a kitchen type area that I could clean and dry my clothes. I borrowed a small hand towel to cover myself as I washed my clothes (as they were dirty with brown muddy water I had tried to walk through previously), and as I had just started to dry them, the power went out. "CRAP! I don't want to wear wet clothes!" went through my mind. "Oh well, I'll just have to manage." I thought, just as a bunch some of my students' mothers walk into the room where I'm buck naked covered by a lonely hand towel. It was an embarrassing moment, needless to say, and I covered my privates with the hand towel in one hand and retrieved my wet clothes out of the drier with the other. They sensed my embarrassment and one mother said something along the lines of, "It's nothing we haven't seen before." as every single one of them continued to watch me. Ugh! "If you've all seen this before, why are you staring so hard to catch a glimps!" I thought. I hurriedly dressed and made my way to the main offices.

The power was out, but it just so happen that the Uken Fire Department shared the same building as the Uken Board of Education and had a power generator. So with the power generator, we were able to to get power to some of the power outlets in the building. Though we had power to some of the building, the phone, satellite TV and internet were out. We caught wind that the town hall also had power and was able to use their phones, satellite TV and internet and wondered why we couldn't. I figured that our building's networking structure didn't have power to these utilities and it got me thinking. "If I could find the local hub for these utilities and run an extension cord to them, I could probably get them working." I voiced my idea to the rest of the people in the office and they immediately said, "lets not mess with that." I knew it was a simple matter so I started to check around the building for a room that housed the networking devices for the phone and computer network servers. I found it and then (without asking), grabbed a very long extension cord and stung it out to the room I had found. I then unplugged everything in the room and connected them into the extension cord I had strung, plus a few multi-connectors. As soon as I had everything connected, one of the fire department personnel came running in saying, "We have phone and internet capabilities!" No one knew that I had done this and when I told them, they all started praising me like I'm some sort of genius. I then told them they could probably watch TV too and they checked and saw it was working, they went bananas. I'm not saying I know all about server networks, routing, phone lines and things of the sort, but I know enough to know that if someone else in the area has it, we should be able to also. So I single handedly helped the Uken Fire Department regain communications of more than their mobile phones. It wasn't that great of a feat, but it seemed like it to them.

They don't have any big stores in Uken so food became scarce the first night, everyone having bought most of the instant food in the first couple of hours hearing it was going to be a disaster. While I was washing and drying my clothes, the announced that they were going to evacuate a bunch of people in the surrounding area. With no food, people donated rice and other things to feed the evacuated people, hence the mothers' of my students barging in on me while I was drying my clothes to start to prepare food for the evacuees.

How long should I make this post? Well, I guess I should tell the whole story, so it's going to get long.

Emergency rations are, well, emergency rations. The rice that was donated was divided and put into long plastic bags. They also added some watered-down soy sauce, tied the top of the bag off with a rubber band and boiled the contents for 30 minutes. What came out was a ball of putty rice that didn't taste that bad. That morning my wife had made me a breakfast sandwich that I had halved with her since I'm on a diet. So from the morning at 6:30am, I didn't have anything to eat until about 8:00pm that evening. I was hungry and didn't complain with what I had.

The next day, everyone was assessing the damage. With no breakfast, I headed out with a few members of the Uken Board of Education to assess the damage to different schools in our district. We checked the schools and headed back to the offices. More people had donated more food and they decided to make curry rice. They tried to stretch what they had and the curry became curry soup. The rice was the rice they had made the previous day and the soft mushy rice was now a cold, hard, thick ball inside the plastic back. Not having very much to eat in well over 24 hours, it was delicious.

We heard that the southern city of Koniya was going to have a boat to ferry people to Naze that evening. When I heard that I thought, "If I could only make it to Koniya." Well, as luck would have it, word came over the radio that they had opened a way to Koniya, albiet the road was very round about. Several teachers that work in Uken don't actually live in Uken. When they heard this news they started to make plans to make their way to Koniya. I din't know if I could find a place to park in Koniya, as parking is hard to come by in Japan, so I left my car in Uken and found passage to Koniya with a fellow teacher who actually lived in there. I was able to by a ticket and I found my way back to Naze early Friday morning.

So I've been back in Naze since Friday waiting for the roads to open up. I heard today that they were open but the backup was pretty bad. Since I have work tomorrow, and they probably expect me to be there, I decided to go pick my car up today. I borrowed my brother-in-law's car and made my way to Uken with my wife.

These are the photos I took of my way to Uken today. I didn't want to cause a hassle so all the photos are literally point-and-shoot, just putting my camera out the car window or shooting inside from the car as I was driving. They've had a couple of days for clean-up and it's not quite like I saw it the first and second day, but you get an idea how bad it was.

Here's the slideshow

You get an idea of just how bad it was, but as I said, they've had the chance to clean up so roads aren't as bad as they were the first and second day. They were able to move most of the silt and rock from the middle of the roads to provide safe passage but, in the hairier places, it's still pretty nasty. They also flew in a bunch of Japanese Defense Force personel to help with the disaster as you can see in some of the photos.

So those are the photos I took from the city of Amami to Uken passing through Sumio Town. This is just one section of Amami that was hit hard. There are plenty of other places that were hit just as hard, but I don't want to add to the traffic jams and hassles, just to get some photos so this is all I took.

Also, I wrote this up and tried to double check it, but I know I have a bunch of spelling, punctuation and grammar mistakes and I just don't have have the time to run over it several times to look for mistakes. Feel free to e-mail me if you find any. I'll fix those up when I get the chance. Tahnsk... lol

Post Edit: Fixed up a some spelling and added a few Google Map links as well as widdle down the amount of photos I had in the slideshow to about half.

September 26 was the set day for the schools in Uken to hold their field days. Amuro Elementary/Junior High is the furthest away for me to commute to and it takes me about an hour and twenty minutes to get to. Two of the schools I visit only have a handful of students and Amuro is one of them.