World media went into overdrive covering the disastrous outcome of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the U.S. Gulf Coast this past August. CNN covered the chaos nearly 24/7 with endless interviews and video coverage. The online version of the Washington Post (WashingtonPost.com), which was the first major newspaper to bring the world QTVR panoramas a few years ago with its coverage of Iraq, continued its commitment to the technology with panoramas of the Gulf Coast shot by in-house photographers Travis Fox and John W. Poole. And in an exciting development for the VR community, they hired independent VR photographer Ed Fink to shoot aerial panos of the devastation.In addition to 26 panoramas of Katrina’s devastation in Pascagoula, Biloxi, Waveland and New Orleans- displaying scenes such as WalMart after looters had passed through, the garbage-strewn convention center and Superdome after storm victims were evacuated, and Johnny White’s bar on Bourbon Street, which remained open throughout the aftermath – the Washington Post hired Minneapolis’ Ed Fink to shoot aerial footage (nine panoramas in total) of the Mississippi Coast Storm Damage, including Biloxi Beach Coliseum, Gulfport Harbor and Pass Christian.
Ed Fink’s Aerial Panorama of Arabi, Orleans ParishWashingtonPost.com graciously allowed VRMag to republish one of Ed Fink’s panos from his exclusive series on this website in fullscreen QTVR. But for VRMag readers, Fink’s story on getting the shots will be as interesting as the panos themselves.
click here to acces the Gulf Coast mapEd Fink was safely at home 1,200 miles north of all the action watching news footage on TV. Fink, who had experienced several hurricanes, starting with Camille in 1969, while previously living in Biloxi, Gulfport and New Orleans, felt emotionally tied to the area and desperate to shoot some aerial panoramas. Over the past couple weeks he had emailed big newspapers, networks, and anyone he thought could help him get down to the area and rent a helicopter but no one would agree to pull out their credit card once the no fly zone was lifted.
“With each passing day I felt more and more drawn to the disaster, and my memories of Camille grew stronger”, Fink recalls. “It sounds corny, but I almost felt destined to do the panoramas. Every photo I saw I’d shout “Oh yeah – I remember that place!” or “Look - I used to unload barges on that canal!” or “Hey kids, that’s the hospital where you guys were born!” After I found that eight people had died at the Tivoli Hotel in Biloxi, where I had worked for several years, and where my son had once worked, it felt even more personal, and I knew I had to go.”
When Fink told his wife he was going, even if it meant hitchhiking, she agreed to sign over the title to an old car, which he would drive to Gulfport and hopefully trade to a pilot for a few hours of helicopter time. Failing that, Plan B was to hang around a helipad with his front-page newspaper photo and try to convince a pilot to fly him in exchange for copies of the panoramas. Plan C: Hang around the helipad looking sad.
Fortunately, at the last minute Tom Kennedy at the Washington Post contacted Fink and agreed to pay for the helicopter and a six-month exclusive on the aerial panorama series. . “It was good thing, too”, he says, “as no pilot good enough to fly me would have wanted my car! It died in Mississippi so I abandoned it, and (thanks to the Washington Post) I flew home when I was finished instead of hitchhiking.”
Fink bunked with an old friend in Long Beach, MS, near a helicopter school but had difficulty getting a helicopter as those that hadn’t been damaged by Katrina were running for cover from approaching Hurricane Rita or helping evacuate oil rigs. Another big problem was communication; with phones service erratic and down for hours at a time, arranging a pilot and helicopter was a difficult endeavor.
In the end, he found a pilot in northeast Louisiana and paid him to fly down to the coast. “The pilot almost backed out when he saw my camera and monopod, and found out I wanted to hold the camera down below the landing skids. ‘Why the hell can’t you just take the damn pictures the way everybody else does?’” the pilot shrieked. “I showed him the newspaper article about me, said I’d done this dozens of times with other pilots, showed him how my safety line attached to both the monopod and camera, and then most importantly, I paid in advance, which cleared up all the problems.”
Fink’s plan was to shoot from Biloxi to New Orleans on the same flight, but with Rita on the way, rain clouds to dodge and lost shots because of raindrops on his lens, he decided to play it safe and shoot New Orleans after Rita, rather than risking the rest of his budget on a trip that might get rained out. It was a good decision, he says, as he was able to capture the new flooding and levee breaches caused by Rita. In New Orleans, even with all the heavy air traffic, helicopters seemed to fly wherever they wanted. At one point, as they hovered at 1000 feet for a shot of the Superdome, Fink noticed a Blackhawk flying directly beneath them. “We sounded like something out of Top Gun: ‘Where?!! I don’t have him! I don’t have him!!’ ‘Straight down!! Heading east! Right there! Right there!’”
Whenever they flew over some interesting damage, the pilot stopped and hovered while Fink extended his monopod with its Nikon D70 and Sigma 8mm lens to take his four shots. Why four? “Because that’s the way I do it on the ground, and at $1,200 an hour, I stick with what I know.”
He points out that when you’re paying $10 to $20 a minute for a helicopter, little things can turn into expensive mistakes, such as not bringing enough lens wipes, for instance. “It was 95 degrees. I was living in the woods in a one-room shack without plumbing, and my clothes were dirty, greasy, and soaked with perspiration. Even when I was extra careful not to touch the lens, I’d drip sweat onto it, and the more I tried to clean it with my clothes, the dirtier it got. Worse - I ripped a wire out of my hacked IR remote in mid flight. I knew that was a weak link, so I had two of them, but I forgot and left the spare in my camera case at the helipad! We were close enough that it was only a $200 mistake, but it could have been a total loss. The second remote acted up on the New Orleans flight and I lost a few pictures because of it”.
Yet Fink feels he was incredibly lucky on his trip: “The day I did the New Orleans aerials I started off the morning homeless, with no car and no money, dropped off at the helipad with all my suitcases. That’s when the mechanic told me the helicopter I was waiting for would be down at least another day or two and the pilot had driven back to New Orleans. Four hours of phone calls later, just as I was starting to wonder if sleeping on asphalt would be softer than sleeping on concrete, I found Panther Helicopters in Belle Chasse, LA. Panther had two important things going for them - a Bell Jet Ranger (although at $1,200/hr.), and they thought the Washington Post was prestigious enough that they agreed to juggle their schedule around to fit me in. After shooting panoramas from Pass Christian to New Orleans, the pilot dropped me off at the airport with my suitcases, and two hours later I was on a direct flight home to Minneapolis. That was awesome.”
