I’ll try to resist the urge to crow any further about what fun I had flying in a helicopter on Monday of this week. I am working on a project for the Baton Rouge Area Foundation about coastal erosion and its impacts on the effected communities. It has been an exciting project to be involved with from the start and I am excited to see the final product which will be bound as a book and available through The Water Institute of the Gulf (as I understand it). BRAF is a great group to work for because they allow you a huge amount of creative latitude with which to execute projects and their goals and endeavors are smart, well-executed and altruistic. There really isn’t an organization I’d rather do work for.
However, because the bulk of the shots I have been taking for them are for an, as of yet, unreleased project/book, I am limited in what I can post. That said, I took around 2300 photos on Monday and some of them having nothing to do with the project and others are ones that won’t make the final cut but are worth getting out there all the same. With this in mind, here are some of the shots that I like but feel confident will not be used by BRAF or TWIG.
We flew out of Lakefront Airport in a Robinson R-44 owned by Crescent City Helicopters. May, the writer for the text portion of the project sat up front with the pilot, Jim. My friend, travelling companion, old school chum and fellow photographer, Collin Richie, sat next to me in the back of the helicopter. Our trip first took us out over the Mississippi River and the city of New Orleans, then south towards Grand Isle, over into Saint Bernard Parish, northerly to Lake Borgne and then back around to the airport. The total flight time was about 3 hours. In that time we saw some pretty amazing things— ship wrecks, ancient brick forts from the War of 1812 and Civil War, clutches of wild hogs tearing through the marsh scrub with the skyline of the city just a few miles away and all that great mat of marsh and brackish water that defiantly pokes its head up above the waves south of Interstate 10. It was a great trip and one I would love to repeat.
I think I am safe in posting these photos as they either don’t pertain to the project I was hired to do or I have better ones for BRAF’s use. But, I still feel pretty good about these. Anyway, a Monday in a helicopter is better than a Monday just about anywhere else.
