I was putting up posters last week for the Beyond Jena forum. I thought to myself, “New Orleans East always gets left out of the mix these days. I’m going to start out there.” So I drove out there and started looking around for a little coffeeshop or some such where I could put a poster.
Damn. I don’t get out there much, but I was soon well reminded of just how devastated the East was by the floods, and how much is still just gone.
I didn’t find a coffeehouse. But I did find the lakeside levee. I took this picture at the end of Read Boulevard.
Not bad for a phone camera. I cropped it so the three horizontal elements were roughly equal. J. Stratton said he liked the flatness of it. “Very abstract. Could almost be a flag.”
That got me thinking. When I had a spare moment yesterday, I took the original into Photoshop and dropped a heavy horizontal blur on it, ran it through a median filter with a huge radius, boosted the saturation and tweaked the tonality.
The result:
I like this. But it’s easy to get carried away with Photoshop.
I finally did manage to get a poster up in the window of a little grocery. I was going to take a picture of it, but I got panhandled in the parking lot, so I didn’t linger.
I like the former more than the latter.
If I’m not mistaken, those are the stairs that were on the levee adjacent to my fishing camp, which was along Hayne Boulevard just past Read. It was a neat place (www.neworleanscamps.com) that Katrina took. Nothing left but a few pilings.