I recently participated in a photography workshop in the Atchafalaya basin located in south central Louisiana. We spent two days at Lake Martin photographing a huge heron and egret rookery and three days in remote bayous photographing flooded woodlands and lakes bordered by old growth cypress trees from small boats. The workshop was organized by Joe Van Os Photo Safaris and was led by Joe Van Os and the accomplished nature photographer, John Shaw.
All the photographs were taken using a Pentax 6x7 camera using Fuji Provia 100 and 400 film and scanned on an Imacon FlexTight Photo scanner. While I don't normally use 400 speed film, photographing from moving boats made it necessary to keep exposure times short and even using high speed film, depth of field was not always as good as one might like. Nonetheless, the scenery was spectacular and it was great to get away and remember that writing image editing software is not a substitute for taking pictures.
I have uploaded two slide shows, one with sound and one without -- both include the same 8 images from the trip. Ambient sound was recorded on location using a Sony portable digital audio tape recorder with a Sennheiser shotgun microphone. The recorded sound was then transferred digitally to computer and was extensively processed using Sound Forge and its companion noise reduction plug-in. While the sound conveys a certain extra sense of what it was like to be there, the sound files are fairly large. With sound, the slide show is about 4.7 MB. The version without sound contains the same images minus the sound files and is around 1.2 MB. The slide show with sound is set up to advance manually from image to image to allow time for downloading the sound files. The one without sound plays automatically. Just click one of the links below to view the corresponding slide show.
Atchafalaya slide show with sound (Sound may not work unless viewed using Internet Explorer)
Atchafalaya slide show without sound
Jonathan Sachs
4-May-2000