Rising Water from Frank McMains on Vimeo.
We all know that a big wall of water is coming down the Mississippi. It will top the levee by more than four feet in the north Louisiana town where my Mother is from. The last time it got this high was in 1927. My grand-mother evacuated to Galveston, TX for 3 months and swore she would never return. Never return to Galveston, that is. Even here in Baton Rouge, where the levees are high and well maintained, there is talk that it could top them by a few feet a block down from Red Star. I’ve never had a water-front bar before.
Anyway, here is another little time-lapse movie showing the river in mild flood but with regular shipping traffic carrying on as usual. A train comes and goes, tugs push barges up the river, people wander the top of the levee and traffic whips along the bridge. I am not sure how bad things are going to get but you can bet that the river and all of downtown is going to look a little bit different when the water crests here sometime around the 21st.
For the photo geeks out there, this is 671 images shot over about 2 hours with a Canon 5D MKII and a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4 L USM (with a BW Kaesemann polarizing filter). Taken using Av mode at f/4 with shutter speeds between 1/800 and 1/1000 at ISO 100, manual focused to infinity. The photos were processed in Aperture (mainly with a tweaked version of the Purple Haze preset) then compiled in iMovie. The music is Two Feet High and Rising by Mr. Johnny Cash.