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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.
Sunday morning I joined two professors from Texas A&M, Wayne Smith and Helen DeWolf, for a morning wandering through Lake Sommerville State Park. This is an area that Carrie and I have been wanting to visit for quite some time as we are struggling a bit to find some local natural areas when we are itching to get out and away from the computer and library. It’s a beautiful area and I really enjoyed the time we had there.
The light was a little harsh as we were there late in the morning so I decided to continue to shoot in black and white. The oaks in the area were starting to turn yellow and I really enjoyed the way the light was backlighting the leaves. The bright yellow leaves lit by the late morning sun from behind in combination with the dark branches and trunks caught my eye and I captured a few different scenes.
Later on, Wayne found a couple of plants that were totally covered in butterflies. By covered, I mean on 3 small bushes we had probably 50+ individuals with at least half a dozen species. It was quite an amazing sight. I didn’t have a macro lens with me, only my 24-70mm zoom so I had fun trying to get some wide angle shots including the butterflies and the flowered plants they were feeding on. This was the first time I have ever tried anything like this and while the lighting isn’t great, it was fun following these beautiful insects around. If anyone knows the ID of the insects or the flowers, I’d be grateful.
About two weeks ago, I joined Texas Ornithological Society president, Ron Weeks, for a tour of the sanctuaries owned by TOS on the Upper Texas Coast to survey the impact of Hurricane Ike. We visited the sanctuaries both in High Island as well as those further up the coast near Sabine Woods. The impact was substantial but it could have been far worse. Most of the large trees survived. Much of the underbrush is gone due to the storm surge. Debris was nearly absent from Sabine Woods, but will require extensive cleanup at Hook’s Woods in High Island where the sanctuary was the first line of trees for the oncoming storm surge.
I took numerous photographs of all the sanctuaries, including some interactive panoramas that I will be posting in the coming days once I figure out how to include them in the blog software. However, tonight, I just wanted to post this single image from Hook’s Woods. The flag may make it a bit cliche, but it is quite symbolic. What you see here are the remains of several homes that once stood across the street. This is essentially a wrack line, like the high water mark on a beach. These trees were the first obstruction that the oncoming water faced after the storm surge crossed the Bolivar Peninsula. The debris from the homes along Front Street, and likely those on the Bolivar, ended up in the woods here. The debris piles included entire walls, a boat, a trailer still attached to a pickup truck, and a corvette as well as numerous heartbreaking objects of everyday life.
This is just the beginning of a series I will be posting over the coming weeks and months as I document how the natural areas of the Upper Texas Coast react and recover to the impacts of Hurricane Ike’s winds and storm surge. Stay tuned for more images and reports.
Last March I had a portfolio review with the photo editor for National Geographic’sKids 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!
I am back after a long hiatus from blogging. I am sorry it has been so long but I look forward to getting back to it. A couple months back, before I took my hiatus, I posted an About this Blog page trying to give myself a bit of direction. I hope it generates some discussion and interest in my work and the subjects I am photographing. While my passion is for nature and wildlife photography, I am currently exploring other fields including sports photography, architecture, panorama, and even a portrait here or there. It is my hope to use this blog as a place where I can post some of my images, ideas, and my perspective on photography as a medium and industry. I encourage you to post comments and hope that we can create a place for lively discussion.
