Perspectives

Click and Drag within image to explore the scene.  You can zoom in and out with Cmd/Ctrl and Shift. 

After Hurricane Ike barreled through the towns of Bolivar, Glaveston, Sabine Pass, and other areas along the Upper Texas Coast, we were all inundated with photographs and video of the devastation to homes, business, and other manmade structures throughout the region.  What didn’t receive much attention was the impact of Ike on the numerous natural areas scattered along the coast.  I set out to try and document some of this impact and will continue to create images as the areas recover from the damage.

Click and Drag within image to explore the scene.  You can zoom in and out with Cmd/Ctrl and Shift. 
 

Part of this project is to use traditional still photography but I am trying to incorporate a new technique as well, spherical panoramas.  I first began this technique this past summer in Costa Rica while working on Canopy in the Clouds and am continuing to expand on my skills.  Spherical panoramas capture the world in a unique way and I am especially interested in how this type of imagery can be used as a teaching tool.  I will write much more about this technique, my setup, and my plans for how I will use it in the future, but today I just wanted to show you a few images.

The top image is taken from what remains of Front Street in High Island.  The huge debris pile is on the edge of the Texas Ornithological Society’s Hooks Woods Bird Sanctuary.  Much of the debris, including the side of the house came from the lots on the other side of the street (towards the sun) where there is no longer anything but a concrete slab.

The lower image is Highway 87 just past the entrance to McFaddin National Wildlife Refuge outside of Sabine Pass.  The section of the highway between Sabine Pass and High Island has been closed to traffic for several years because of movement of the dunes.  However while the road may not have been maintained, it has not completely collapsed but rather been buried by sand.  The storm surge associated with Hurricane Ike simply ate into the dunes, undercut the road, and you see what remains.  Previously, where you see water by the side of the road was a fragile, yet complete, dune.

Last March I had a portfolio review with the photo editor for National Geographic’s Kids and Little Kids magazines.  It was quite a critique and I came away vowing to try and create new and different images.  If you have seen any of my work from Costa Rica this summer, you will see I am trying a lot of new things, yet still doing some of what I used to do.  Over the next few weeks and months, I will be posting some of that work and I think you will find that it is definitely quite different from my usual work and I hope proves to be somewhat unique.  

In my pursuit of seeing the world in new ways, I have a bit of an itch to return to working in black and white.  This all started a couple weeks ago when I began a project documenting the impact of Hurricane Ike on the refuges and reserves of the Upper Texas Coast.  Witnessing and photographing both the destruction of towns and transformation of natural areas got me seeing in black and white.  I will be posting some of those images in the next few days.

I must confess though, credit for the idea of converting the above image to B&W must go to my girlfriend, Carrie.  She and I spent sunrise on Sunday morning wandering around a local park here in College Station.  She is making an effort to learn more about photography, so we both were wandering with cameras when we were presented with this scene.  We both took some nice images, but it was only when I was showing her the basics of raw processing in Adobe Camera Raw, that she tried converting one of her images to B&W. 

Tonight, while waiting for some batch processing to complete, I decided to give it a try myself.  Playing with Photoshop CS3’s black and white adjustment layer is a dream compared to the old channel mixer and I am fairly pleased with the result.  I gave it a slightly warm tone that I think fits the mood fairly well.  If I am not careful, I may find myself carrying around the 4×5 with some black and white film here shortly!