Tuesday, August 05, 2008

Hello Edouard

It's been pretty hectic the past few days.

As you know, I spent the weekend in St. Petersburg attending Geekfest, an annual workshop hosted by AphotoAday.org.

The workshop was awesome. I don't think I've ever left a workshop more inspired.

I planned on posting some more Pittsburgh stuff

I planned on posting some "real camera" pictures from Geekfest

But I had a little run-in with Tropical Storm Edouard yesterday that kind of put a kink in my plans.

So I'm going to skip Pittsburgh and Geekfest stuff for now and show you what Edouard did.

Robert Zullo and I headed down the bayou yesterday to see what Edouard was up too. It wasn't much. Some nice wind, a little rain, but that's about it.

But, the storm surge started pushing water up into Terrebonne. Keep in mind, the storm was about 100 miles south of Houma, and it still pushed about two feet of water into places in Southern Terrebonne. That's pretty scary. Just imagine if we get hit by a big storm. They'll be nothing left.

We hung out with some fishermen on Island Road. We continued down the road towards the island until we realized water was really starting to go across the road and we didn't want to be stuck on the Island all night.

So we headed to Chauvin where we met quite an intersting family.

We found two kids swimming in the flood waters outside their home. I started to take pictures and asked if a parent was home.

Their mother came outside, walked down the steps and just splashed into the water like it wasen't even there. She was covered in tattoos, and visibly drunk. Quite the charactor.

So we hung out there for a while. Here's my favorite picture from there (and from the entire day for that matter)


I forgot to bring my other photos home with me, so if you want to see more, I posted a photo gallery online.

We also produced a video. You'll get a chance to meet the mother. We only had one or two usable quotes from her because she was ether cursing up a storm, or too drunk to understand.



And I promised Misty I'd blog about a doodle she made this weekend. I must admit, it's a pretty sweet doodle. I told her it reminded me of Cat in the Hat. Interesting side note... this doodle was made on the back of a post card given to us by a Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Preston Gannaway. She did an awesome photo story that can be seen here.


Hopefully things will slow down a bit later this week so I can post some more stuff from the past two weekends. Actually, I almost have to get that stuff posted because we're spending this weekend in New Orleans attending the Women in Photojournalism workshop. Another weekend of inspiration.... then football season starts.