LA OIL 2.0

I headed back down to LA on assignment this past week, this time shooting for environmental group nrdc.org. Last time i was here 2 weeks ago, the shit was just hitting the fan over in grande isle on my last day here. All those shots of pelicans you saw in the oil were from the grande isle area, which is an hour by boat from where I was staying. I didnt get there then, but I did get there this time with the group from NRDC, which included big wave surfer laird hamilton and his wife gabby reece. The pelican island has since been cleaned up and surrounded with oil boom, but we still found plenty of oil in other places. We snooped a bit around the uninhabited islands in the area and also the main inlet, and these pics are what we found. The worst evidence we found was free floating oil in the main inlet. Big chunks of oil, almost lard like, moving in and out of the inlet with the ebb and flow of the tide. super thick and fatty. there were alot of boats skimming oil in the area, but it was still pretty easy to find the oil if you looked in the shallower water that the skimmer boats couldnt go in. Laird put on a rubber glove and scooped some up and help it up for my camera, that guy knows a photo moment for sure. It all felt like a bit of a press junket really, with the 3 boats we had and all of the people we had with us. The next day i went out alone and went over to some small uninhabited islands to see it up close first hand. You have to wander a bit to actually get on an island as the close islands are ringed with boom already and not able to get close. I did find some affected islands, but even those i was kicked off of by coast guard types because of the "nesting birds", but honestly it feels like a bit of a press block to keep us from showing it. I got enough though with the time i had. I still didnt see any major wildlife being affected or dead from the spill, but did see crabs and some fish. I was talking again with cajun fisherman friend ryan lambert, and he noticed the kill seems to be coming from the "bottom up". the dead creatures are all bottom living animals, from the crabs, to the catfish and flounder we saw, which are also bottom livers and feeders. scary stuff as it seems most of the oil is sinking. as you know, i've fished my whole life and killed plenty of fish to eat, but when you see death like this its disturbing because it just isnt supposed to be this way. everything dies eventually, its the natural way, but when you see death like this, it grabs you a bit because it just wasnt supposed to happen in such an unnatural way.....heading back to nyc tomorrow, not sure when i will be back here, but crossing my fingers they get that hole plugged soon and the end will then be in sight...nw

LA OIL

I’ve been going down to Venice Louisiana for several years now, as a photographer sometimes, but as a fisherman always. I’ve fished offshore for the pelagics like tuna and marlin, and I’ve also fished inshore in the marshes for coastal species like trout and redfish. It’s an understatement to say the fishing is exceptional there. We've caught so many fish and so many different species, I always come back with amazing fishing stories that are so brash they almost sound like “fishing stories”. It really transcends any fishery I’ve ever fished, and I’ve fished a lot. I was down there last week on an oil story, and I can show these on my blog. It was kinda hard to find affected areas as the delta marshes are gigantic, unless you had a boat and some time to get to the barrier islands. We had good friend and fishing guide Ryan Lambert of Cajun Fishing Adventures take us out. The Mississippi river delta is a massive place, it was about 45 minutes by boat through the marshes to the last strip of barrier islands before the open gulf. As we got close to an island on the backside, we started to see the oil slick in the bay, not thick black oil, just a sheen on the water, too subtle to photograph, but you could smell it. We pulled up on the back of the island, got out, and walked out onto the beach on the front of the island. Pretty instantly we started seeing big gooey tar balls on the beach and also coating everything from old beer cans to marsh vegetation. I decided to really concentrate on these objects eerily coated in oil. I didn’t style, pickup, or move anything, just walked along and shot pictures of the oil. The strange thing was the eerie absence of wildlife, dead or alive. We saw a couple of seagulls on the beach with a little bit of oil on them, but mostly the beach was empty of birds. Technically speaking, I dragged along a lighting kit with me, and lit the pictures to give them a bit of eerie style. Ultimately, I wanted the images to be beautiful, and repulsive at the same time, give you a reason to look at them in a very direct and different way. Its strange to photograph a tragedy like this in a place that you are intimately connected to. The truly ultimate irony is when fishing offshore there, the oil rigs were always the fishing destination and that’s where we would setup. The fish all congregate underneath and around the rigs, as the small bait fish use it for protection. I had fished on several rigs in the gulf, and today wonder if one of them had been the Deepwater Horizon…