Amami Superman Photography

Metaroka is a tribute band to Metallica. I suppose you say the pronunciation is meta-rocker, but it sounds close to Metallica in Japanese, sorta...

Every year they hold Summerfest at Ohama Beach here in Amami. My friend Daiju (Mr. D), plays guitar for Metaroka. Daiju owns a cafe called Clo-bar. His cafe is a nice little place with some pretty tasty dishes. Anyway, I came out to cheer on some of out local bands here in Amami.

Summerfest lasts for 2 days and usually has over 50 bands that come out to play. It's pretty fun to come and watch if you're up to sitting out in the sun most of the afternoon, which is pretty hot and tiresome. Metaroka started their stage just a little after 4:00pm so there was some shade from the palms to hide under.





Daiju and Naru are in another band called Gas Coin. Gas Coin is a punk rock band and are pretty popular here in Amami. I've been to a few of their stages and I get a laugh from their main vocal.



Taro is a very talented guitarist. I took some photos of him a few years ago playing acoustic guitar at an anniversary party at Susumocho.

They played 2 or 3 songs from Metallica. I forget which ones they played but one I do remember one was Enter the Sandman, very awesome. I got chills.







Daigo is another good friend of mine. He runs the surf shop with my wife's older brother. I took photos of his yoinou a few years back. Daigo is also a very talented musician. He can play drums as well as guitar and a few other instruments.









Only Daiju can pull off being a hardcore rocker and wear flip-flops.

So those are a few photos I took from Summerfest this year. It was hot and I was pretty tired from work so I didn't stay to see everyone. We let our daughter swim for a while and then headed for home.

Work has been pretty busy for me. We were supposed to have Amami Festival happen this weekend but we had a typhoon come near us and they rescheduled it for later this month. They did have the hachigatsu odori yesterday and the parade today, but it was rainy and I didn't chance taking my camera out. We still have a few festivals scheduled around the island so hopefully it will be good weather and I'll be able to get some photos of those.

So after our daughter got her hair cut and we went to pick her up, we were walking home and I decided to take some photos of her on the way. The previous post's photos are some of those photos. This is another that wasn't that great on its own but with a few post editing graduated ND filters and a nice crop, I thought it turned out OK. Oh, and I used my flash, hence the title of this blog post.

I dialed down my on-board camera's flash compensation to -3.0 and shot. I don't like harsh contrasting shadows from flashes so I don't use my on-board flash that often. Eventually I would like to buy a flash and start experimenting with it. Learning how to diffuse the light from a flash is something I'd like to learn and it's high up on my list of things I'd like to study. I just have to buy a flash. But before I buy a flash, I would like to buy a new camera body. I've been saying this for over a year now, but I really do think I need to buy a new one. It's just not high up on my Things I Want to Spend My Money on list, but eventually I will. I still got my eye on a Nikon D300s.

Oh, and the title for the photo, "Glamour Shots by Deb are 75% Off", is from the movie Napoleon Dynamite if you were wondering what that was all about.

My wife and daughter decided between themselves that yesterday would be a good day to go get our daughter's hair cut. I like long hair for the most part and liked the way Jade looks in a pony tail, especially when she's playing basketball. But, it's the summer time and I guess long hair makes things quite hot. So they decided to get it chopped off short. Her hair used to fall down to around her waist. Now she can't even tie it back if she wanted to.



When I went to pick Jade up from the beauty salon, this little boy come running up to me ready to throw his arms around me. "Who's this little boy?!" I shouted. Jade stopped in her tracks and almost started to cry. I quickly pulled her in and gave her big hug and told her how beautiful she looked.



I have to admit that it wasn't as bad as I was expecting. I actually like it, although, it makes her look a bit older. I wish I could stop time. I don't want her to grow up so fast and she's just racing through the years it seems. She's 10 already! Holy cow. It just seems like yesterday I was gagging and dry heaving trying to changer her diapers.

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!"

Our daughter, Jade, started basketball last year and has been having a blast. I've going to see most of all her games and I've taken plenty of photos, but I've only posted a handful. The reason for this is, they all sucked. I don't get too angry with myself if I take a bad photo that's not framed well, lacks contrast or is just plain bland photo. I do get angry with myself, however, when I screw up the camera settings when I know better. Every single time I've gone to take photos of Jade playing basketball, the exposure always turned out inconsistent. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I'd use manual exposure settings and even turn of auto white balance, take several photos from one spot only to have them all come out like I took each photo with different settings. I was pretty discouraged after looking at these photos I took from 2 Sundays ago.



Well, I won't go into details, but they got their butts kicked. They have 2 teams at Jade's school, an A team and a B team. The A team is for the 5th and 6th graders and the B team is for the younger classes, kind of like varsity and junior varsity. Although Jade is only in 4th grade, she is on the A team. This is because they don't have enough players in the 5th and 6th grades this year. So this year the A team has a lot of inexperienced players as well as a lack of height.



In these next photos, most of them were taken from the same spot facing the same direction all with the same exact exposure settings. I couldn't figure out why they all seemed to have different lighting. The lights weren't being turned on and off, or were they?













Jade made several shots in this game. I believe she made 50% of the points made for her team. Not that she's a ball hog or anything, lol, she was just in the right spot.

As you can see, the lighting is very inconsistent despite using the same exposure settings for each photo. Some of these photos were even taken using continuous shooting and are less than a second apart. Looking at these photos I noticed this and wondered how one part of the floor is lighter than another when the photos were taken within a second of each other. It then dawned on me that the lights were fluorescent and probably had something to do with cycles.

I then went and searched the interwebz for shooting photos in gyms and found a few articles about this. I found that fluorescent lights change color and even flicker when shooting at faster speeds like the photos I took causing these kinds of inconsistencies. So when I read that, I was all, "OH! So that's why I suck!"